Participated · Seed · Dec 2025

LayerBank operates a universal on-chain money market that supports more than 150 markets across 17 blockchains spanning EVM, Move, and BTC ecosystems. Its platform enables users to lend, borrow, and deploy sophisticated yield strategies through a single, chain-abstracted interface. The company claims a community of over 693,000 users, underscoring early traction and network effects. LayerBank’s forthcoming native token, $ULAB, underpins its value-accrual model with ve-boosted rewards, fee redistribution, and buy-back-and-lock mechanics designed to align users with platform growth. Proceeds from its recent financing will fund the $ULAB Token Generation Event (TGE) on Movement Network and accelerate rollout of additional automated, user-centric DeFi products. Future plans include bringing deeper liquidity, real-world-asset (RWA) exposure, and more intuitive lending flows to Movement Network. By positioning itself as “the universal liquidity layer,” LayerBank aims to scale capital efficiency and real yield across both DeFi and RWA markets.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2019

Vega is a proof-of-stake protocol that positions itself as the derivatives layer for web3, enabling anyone to create flexible, custom-built derivatives markets. The protocol claims high throughput, instant settlement, and low-fee trading, and allows any blockchain to plug into Vega. Its product focuses on aligning incentives between passive and active liquidity providers and supporting both professional market makers and individual traders and SMEs. Vega aims to bridge traditional finance and DeFi, tackling issues such as MEV, capital efficiency, and scaling. The project emphasizes open, peer-to-peer markets and rapid innovation in derivatives. The company expanded its community to over 21,000 unique participants through a recent token sale. Vega is building a decentralized protocol for creating and trading derivatives markets, aiming to remove centralized gatekeepers and decentralize governance. The protocol seeks to enable instant settlement, reduce fees, eliminate conflicts of interest, and provide the throughput needed for high-volume derivatives trading. Founder Barney Mannerings launched the project in 2018; Vega launched a testnet in Q2 2020 and has iterated on it since. Its wallet software is free and open-source, and the company has issued roughly 500 hosted-wallet IDs for testnet access. Vega plans to use the new capital to ship and test high-quality code and is preparing a mainnet-ready release this summer, after which validators are expected to connect the Vega network to the Ethereum mainnet to enable trading of real crypto assets. Financially, the startup raised $5M in the latest round, bringing total disclosed funding to more than $10M per Crunchbase. Vega is developing a protocol for creating and trading derivatives on a fully decentralized, layer-2 network designed to avoid performance and market fairness issues on layer-1 blockchains. The protocol enables pseudonymous trading and rewards participants for creating new products and providing liquidity. The company is led by founder Barney Mannerings and is based in Gibraltar. Vega is focused on completing and testing the first version of its core protocol and is launching community initiatives to engage developers, traders, and ecosystem partners. The team expects to launch a private test network demonstrating margin trading with test assets imminently, with plans to expand into a publicly available testnet soon after. Vega raised more than $5M in seed funding to support these development and community efforts.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2019

Vega is developing a protocol to enable non-custodial, peer-to-peer margin trading and decentralized derivatives markets with investment bank-grade risk management. The product is a bespoke trading-optimized sidechain (layer-2) designed for 10–100x faster execution than general-purpose blockchains. Key innovations include a fully automated end-to-end trading system, market-creator and market-maker fee incentives, and a framework for creating customizable financial products. The team plans to complete and test the first version of the core protocol, launch a private test network demonstrating margin trading imminently, and open a public testnet soon after. Vega will publish research on decentralized market fairness and trading-optimized consensus protocols, and disclose details about its validator/staking model, market-making incentives, and trading APIs. The company raised a strategic seed of more than $5M to support development and community initiatives.