The Venture Codex

Led · Seed · Mar 2022

Pianity is a music NFT platform built on Arweave that lets musicians and communities create, sell, buy and collect limited-edition songs certified by blockchain. The platform offers free listening and a profit-sharing program that redistributes 50% of its earnings in tokens to active users weekly; Pianity charges a 20% fee on sales. Since launching in 2021 it has sold 11,000 NFTs, has over 20,000 users, and artists have collectively earned more than $1.9M from NFT sales. Pianity emphasizes making music scarce and monetizable outside traditional streaming economics. The company plans to use new funding to partner with major music companies and festivals, scale artist onboarding, and expand its music catalog and genres. It will expand headcount with country managers and artist relations managers and open offices in the U.S. and Latin America. The roadmap also includes building a mobile app and adding streaming features such as NFT playlists and a library.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2021

Zeitgeist is developing a prediction market protocol and app, aiming to be a leading prediction market ecosystem. The team prepared a Beta that used NFTs as entrance gateways and offered themed digital artwork to early supporters. Zeitgeist ran the Kusama Derby on its protocol and is set to deploy as a Kusama parachain after winning a slot auction. The project raised a 77,000 KSM crowdloan to secure the parachain slot and plans to finalize chain runtime before the public app launch. The company closed $14 million in funding and says proceeds will be used to hire talent and build infrastructure for its early 2022 launch. Advisors and strategic partners include experienced Web3 funds and figures such as Gavin Wood.

Participated · Equity · May 2021

McDex operates a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform and has developed V3 of its protocol. V3 is currently on the Arbitrum Beta Net and is scheduled to be deployed to the Arbitrum Mainnet on May 28. The company closed a $7 million funding round whose proceeds will be deposited into the McDex DAO vault. Funds from the round will be used primarily to provide liquidity after the V3 mainnet launch. McDex has fully integrated the Farcaster protocol. The V3 release will be made available to users after deployment.

Participated · Seed · Sep 2020

Bifrost is a Singapore-based DeFi protocol that provides an intermediate layer between staking and application layers to unlock liquidity for PoS tokens. Users can swap PoS tokens into protocol-issued vTokens (for example, vDOT for Polkadot), which are tradable and usable in DeFi applications. The vToken mechanism is designed to preserve staking security while providing liquidity and to enable staking rewards in cross-chain scenarios. Bifrost aims to resolve competition between staking and DeFi rewards by allowing users to obtain staking rewards while accessing liquidity for DEXs, liquidity mining and other DeFi fields. The project completed a $600,000 seed round in September 2020 with investors including NGC Ventures, SNZ Holding, Consensus Lab, Digital Renaissance, Youbi Capital, DFG and Longhash. Bifrost said participating investors include early Polkadot and staking-related institutions expected to provide parachain slot auction and staking liquidity business support in the future.