Participated · Equity · Mar 2024

ALEX develops a decentralized finance layer tailored to the Bitcoin ecosystem. The protocol leverages Layer2 solutions, cross-chain bridges, oracles and additional infrastructure to enable Bitcoin-native DeFi. The team intends to continue building its financial layer on Stacks. The company completed a strategic financing to fund continued protocol and infrastructure development. The article does not disclose operating metrics such as revenue or user counts. The financing is positioned to accelerate ALEX's technical roadmap on Bitcoin-focused stacks. ALEX is deploying its mainnet on Stacks to bring permissionless DeFi to Bitcoin, offering fixed-rate, fixed-term lending and borrowing without risk of liquidation. The platform also includes an advanced decentralized exchange, yield farming, and a launchpad where community members vote on token listings. ALEX’s native token $ALEX opened at $0.32 for the Stacks community on January 10 and will be available for staking at mainnet on January 17. On testnet, over 19,000 unique addresses accessed ALEX and more than 110,000 transactions were processed. The protocol has completed audits with CoinFabrik and Lease Authority and aims to activate dormant bitcoin holdings, citing the potential to mobilize over $1 trillion of idle bitcoin. Financially, ALEX has secured recent financing including a $5.8M round and an additional $2M oversubscribed private round, and plans a retail IDO.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2022

Afropolitan is a community-as-a-service startup that connects the African diaspora through events, travel, media and online community-building. Founded in 2016 by Eche Emole and Chika Uwazie, the company grew its audience via events and social audio (50,000 Clubhouse followers) and the founders’ combined following of over 200,000. Its core product vision is a phased “internet country” built with community tools including passport NFTs, a DAO and a super app offering remittances, e-residency, incorporation services and learn-to-earn initiatives. The company plans to mint 10,000 passport NFTs to activate its DAO and grant members access to events and physical spaces. Later phases target building seed institutions, subsidiary funds and negotiating for physical land to pursue sovereignty. Afropolitan has raised $2.1M in pre-seed to kick-start product development and community growth.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2022

ScienceMagic.Studios is a New York-based digital assets venture studio that advises on and creates digital assets such as NFTs and social tokens for brands, talent and their communities. The company works with partners at every stage to define a Web3 vision, identify useful Web3 use cases for communities, design and launch assets that deliver shared value, and manage emerging economies. It is led by Co-CEOs David Pemsel and Raoul Pal and is structured as a joint venture between ScienceMagic.Inc, Raoul Pal (founder of RealVision) and Delphi Digital. ScienceMagic.Studios supports brands and partners through strategy, design, launch and ongoing economic management of digital assets. The company intends to use the new funding to scale its business reach.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2022

Yomi Games is a Singapore-based blockchain gaming studio led by CEO Pavan Katepalli that advances social Play-and-Earn video games targeted at casual audiences. The studio recently launched its first non-fungible token (NFT) collection, Oni Squad, and an accompanying mini-game, Oni Mansion. The Oni Squad collection consists of 6,666 hand-drawn generative Onis that served as playable assets in Oni Mansion. Yomi plans to publish multiple crypto mobile game titles across a variety of casual genres aimed at mainstream players. The company positions its games as gateways for gamers new to crypto and NFTs and is focused on broad appeal rather than niche crypto-native audiences.

Participated · Equity · Feb 2022

Potion Labs develops the Potion Protocol, a mathematical risk-management layer that allows DeFi liquidity providers to price options based on the Kelly Criterion and aggregates those curves to deliver optimally priced options to users. The company positions the protocol as an essential tool for managing crypto-asset risk, promising deeper and more reliable liquidity markets. To launch the protocol, Potion Labs is rolling out ‘Potion Unlock,’ an on-chain community game that releases the code into the public domain via an NFT mechanism. Ahead of this release, the team completed a $12 million limited pre-sale of the NFT collection, and a wider public NFT sale is planned. Potion Labs previously secured a $3.2 million round in August 2020 from top-tier DeFi investors. The founders emphasize a community-first approach to building Web3 public goods and plan to continue R&D on new decentralized services. Based in Barcelona, the company aims to set a regulatory and governance template for future protocol decentralizations.