Participated · Seed · Jan 2026

Cork is building a protocol that supplies tokenized risk infrastructure, enabling standardized pricing, market-driven hedging, and redemption-liquidity backstops for on-chain assets such as vault tokens, yield-bearing stablecoins, liquid (re)staking tokens, and real-world assets. The system lets asset managers and issuers spin up custom swap markets to enhance redemption liquidity, improve risk transparency, and bolster market confidence. Its composable risk primitives integrate directly with ERC-4626 vaults and other yield-bearing ERC-20 assets, making risk management a native, programmable component of on-chain finance. Future plans include bringing the company’s first risk markets into production, expanding integrations with vault and asset issuers, and supporting regulated product pathways. Cork has secured $5.5 million in seed funding to finance these initiatives, providing the capital base for continued product development and market launch.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2025

ETHGas provides settlement infrastructure that makes every unit of Ethereum blockspace—computation and storage—tradeable through a newly launched Blockspace Futures Market. By offering transaction futures ("pre-confirmations") across multiple maturities and 3 ms settlement latency, the platform lets wholesale Ethereum participants hedge transaction-pipeline risk, boost staking yields, and smooth gas-price volatility. The company is collaborating with the Ethereum Foundation and heeding Vitalik Buterin’s call for a dedicated gas-futures market. Led by former Morgan Stanley Asia structured-derivatives head Kevin Lepsoe, ETHGas’ team includes engineers and quants from Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, HKEx, and Lockheed Martin. At launch, ETHGas secured US$800 million in commitments from validators, block builders, and relays to seed liquidity and product development. Its mission is to evolve Ethereum into a real-time network where end users can hedge gas costs, unlock yield opportunities, and enjoy frictionless blockchain interactions. The company has raised a US$12 million seed round to fund further marketplace expansion and product enhancements.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2024

Magma is a decentralized liquid staking protocol built on the Monad Network that will issue gMONAD as its liquid staking token. The protocol is designing MEV infrastructure to maximize extractable value during block production on Monad. Magma plans to enable users to stake Monad tokens, retain liquidity via gMONAD, and earn staking and restaking rewards through an integration with Ether.fi. The team has established partnerships with a broad set of validators and DeFi primitives to support its launch and security posture. With a $3.9M seed raise, the company intends to further develop its liquid staking platform and MEV architecture. Founders David Mass and Meir Bank bring prior experience from Citibank and AngelDAO and say the project will launch on testnet before moving to mainnet, alongside a community points program.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2024

Layer is a newly founded US startup building developer tooling to support full‑stack decentralized applications using WebAssembly. Its core product is the upcoming Layer SDK, which will let developers write applications in languages like Rust that can run anywhere, including phones. The SDK is designed to enable full‑stack blockchain applications on top of Ethereum – combining smart contracts, consensus, UI, and verifiable off‑chain services such as AI agents, ZK provers, serverless functions, and decentralized messaging servers. Layer aims to extend Ethereum’s functionality by verifying computations outside blockchains to create unstoppable, tamper‑resistant applications. The team says these tools will address limits of smart contracts’ compute and help restore trust in the internet against threats from large companies, attackers, and manipulative AI. The company will use the funding to develop the technology to make online experiences inherently trustworthy.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2024

Founded in October 2023, Bitlayer Labs is building a Bitcoin Layer 2 network based on the Bitcoin Virtual Machine (BitVM) to expand application programmability and tap into Bitcoin security. The team launched mainnet V1 in early 2024 and released a trust-minimized BitVM Bridge in July. Bitlayer has released integrations with chains including Arbitrum, Base, Cardano, and Sui and plans to ship a V2 of its mainnet later this year. The project raised capital through both private and public rounds; the fresh capital will be used for operational expansion, team growth, and ecosystem development. As of this raise, Bitlayer's total funding stands at $29.91 million across private and public rounds. Bitlayer is positioned as the first Bitcoin Layer 2 based on Bitcoin finality, offering a native environment through technologies such as OpVM, Finality Bridge, and RtEVM. It has implemented OpVM, which combines fraud proofs (BitVM) and validity proofs (OP_CAT) to enable Bitcoin L1 verification of arbitrary computations. The project launched Mainnet‑V1 on April 15 and now hosts over 280 deployed DApps across infrastructure, wallets, DeFi, NFTs, gaming, metaverse, and RWAs. Bitlayer reports partnerships with more than 30 Web3 platforms including Hacken, AWS Cloud, Ankr, Polyhedra, Babylon, Particle Network, and Meson. The team is preparing the imminent launch of Bitlayer V2, a Bitcoin‑native rollup whose state transitions are protected by OpVM. The company has raised a total of $25 million to date, funds the team says will accelerate development, scalability, and user accessibility. Bitlayer Labs offers a Bitcoin Layer 2 solution based on the BitVM paradigm. Its core objective is to address the trade-off between security and Turing completeness in BTC Layer 2 through cryptographic innovations and blockchain protocol engineering. The company aims to become the computation layer for Bitcoin, introducing ultra-scalability while inheriting Bitcoin’s security. Bitlayer targets a high-throughput, low-cost transaction experience for users. It intends to use recent funding to expand growth and development efforts. The Series A brought the company’s total capital raised to $16M. Bitlayer is a Bitcoin Layer 2 infrastructure provider building Layer 2 infrastructure for Bitcoin. The company plans to launch its mainnet on April 5. It will introduce an ecosystem incentive program called Ready Player One. Bitlayer announced completion of a $5 million seed financing. The round was led by Framework Ventures and ABCDE Capital, with participation from StarkWare, OKX Ventures, Alliance DAO, UTXO Management, Asymmetric Capital, Kenetic Capital, Pivot Global, Web3Port, Mindfulness Capital, C6E Capital, PAKA, Comma3 Capital, Kronos Ventures, dozens of institutions, and individual investors including Dan Held, Ryan Selkis, and Dan McArdle.