The Venture Codex

Participated · Series A · Aug 2024

Chaos Labs offers an onchain risk platform that delivers comprehensive economic security for crypto protocols through advanced monitoring, real-time simulations, and risk oracles. The platform merges offchain observability with onchain risk-parameter adjustments, enabling DeFi applications to adapt instantly to market volatility. Led by founder and CEO Omer Goldberg, the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate product development and scale its risk management platform. Over the past year Chaos Labs tripled its customer base; today more than 20 protocols, including Aave, GMX, and Jupiter, rely on its technology. The company reports its technology has secured $860B in cumulative trading volume, $25B in loans, and $35M in incentives. Chaos Labs is a provider of an automated economic security system for crypto protocols that uses monitoring and simulations. Led by founder and CEO Omer Goldberg and based in New York and Tel Aviv, the company offers custom and automated economic-security tooling to verify a protocol’s durability and stability in any market condition. Its tooling enables core teams and community members to monitor protocol health and risks in real time and to execute mainnet changes before potential vulnerabilities are exploited. Chaos Labs helps teams protect user funds from market-based attacks and optimize capital efficiency. In its first year, the company partnered with DeFi customers including Aave, Chainlink, Uniswap, BENQI and Osmosis to secure and optimize protocols and to provide capital optimization recommendations. The company raised $20M in Seed funding and intends to use the proceeds to expand its offerings and build out a suite of risk and security products.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2024

Avalon is developing an eponymous multiplayer online game designed to let players create, share, play, and take ownership of experiences, with assets and progression that move between user-generated worlds. The studio emphasizes interoperability and aims to appeal to both web2 and web3 gamers. Avalon has partnered with AI companies Didimo and Inworld AI to enable characters that interact with players in real time. The company is led by founder and CEO Sean Pinnock and is based in Orlando, FL. Avalon is currently under development for PC and cloud streaming. The studio raised $10M in funding to support development of its debut title. Avalon, led by CEO Sean Pinnock, develops a platform and tools that enable creators and designers to build interoperable games and virtual experiences. The company came out of stealth after raising $13M in funding. The round was led by BITKRAFT Ventures, HASHED, Delphi Digital and Mechanism Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Yield Guild Games, Merit Circle, Avocado Guild and Morning Star Ventures. The raise also included individual backers such as Kevin Lin, Charlie Songhurst, Dennis Fong and Robin Jung. Avalon intends to use the funds to expand operations.

Led · 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 · Series A · Sep 2023

Brine Fi operates an orderbook-based decentralized exchange built on Starkware’s Ethereum scaling technology, combining DEX custody with CEX-like order types and low-latency execution. The protocol leverages zero-knowledge proofs to provide privacy on orders and mitigate frontrunning, while remaining fully non-custodial. Brine supports both retail users (including a beginner mode) and institutional traders, and has integrated liquidity aggregation partners such as 0x. During testing from February to June it processed about 4 million transactions and reported over $1.6 billion in trading volume; its recently launched mainnet has accumulated roughly $500 million in trading volume per Starkware stats. The team says the system can execute orders in milliseconds and is onboarding hedge funds, exchanges and high-frequency traders. Brine has also begun using Chainalysis and Merkle Science to prepare for potential KYC/AML regulatory requirements.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2023

Maple Finance is an on-chain institutional credit marketplace operating in the DeFi sector that enables lenders to view loan operations on the blockchain for increased transparency. The three-year-old startup has cumulatively issued $2.2 billion in loans and currently has around $50 million deposited on the platform. It operates with roughly two dozen employees spread mostly across Western Europe and North America. Maple recently rolled out a direct lending business offering overcollateralized loans secured by Bitcoin, Ether, and staked Ether. The company is diversifying into lower-risk products such as tokenized T-bills and plans to offer trade finance to real-world companies. Maple is targeting expansion into Asia (notably Hong Kong and Singapore) and plans to add its first headcount in the region. Maple Finance operates a token-governed DeFi platform that offers institutional lending at competitive, fixed rates with under-collateralized terms. It targets institutions with solid balance sheets, including traders, market makers and crypto-mining firms. Maple allows collateralization as low as 40% and promises fixed rates that will not change for borrowers in good standing; initial collateral deposits need not be revisited. The protocol is organized into pools managed by Pool Delegates; the first pool is planned to hold $10–15 million and will make loans typically in the $1–2 million range. Liquidity providers across Ethereum can participate and will earn MPL tokens via a liquidity-mining scheme; total MPL supply is fixed at 10 million with roughly 30% allocated to liquidity mining. MPL governs the network, earns fees, supports staking for increased returns, and MPL holders may bear the brunt of losses if a borrower defaults.