The New York company trying to make crypto disappear - builder of the XION (now Verona) Layer 1 blockchain, where people sign in with an email or a face scan and pay in dollars, and never learn what a private key is.
In February 2021, a man bought a genuine Banksy print for about $95,000, set it on fire in front of a livestream camera, and sold an NFT of the burning for roughly $382,000. The stunt ricocheted across the BBC, The Guardian, Artnet and The New Yorker, and it gave its author a name that stuck: Burnt Banksy. Behind the alias was Anthony Anzalone, and the fire was never really the point. The point was that ownership could move to the internet - and that most people had no idea how to hold it.
Five years on, Anzalone runs Burnt, the New York company he founded in 2021 to answer the more boring, harder question that the burn only gestured at: how do you get ordinary people onto a blockchain without asking them to become cryptographers? Burnt's answer is a Layer 1 network called XION - rebranded to Verona in 2026 - engineered around a single, almost contrarian idea. If a user ever notices the blockchain, the product has failed.
That is a strange thing for a crypto company to say out loud. The industry has spent a decade adding steps: connect a wallet, approve a transaction, sign a message, bridge to another chain, buy a native token to pay for gas. Burnt spends its time deleting those steps. Its Meta Accounts let people register and log in with an email address or biometrics instead of a twelve-word seed phrase. Its transactions are paid in USDC, the same dollar-pegged stablecoin a user might already be spending, so nobody has to acquire a separate volatile asset just to move money. The complexity does not go away - it gets pushed down into the protocol, out of sight.
The bet is that mainstream adoption is a design problem before it is a technology problem, and that the winning blockchain will be the one nobody talks about. Whether that is right is genuinely unsettled. But it has been convincing enough to attract more than $36 million from Animoca Brands, Circle Ventures and Multicoin Capital, and to put a 23-person team in the same conversation as far larger consumer-crypto efforts.
Builds and stewards XION/Verona, a Layer 1 blockchain using “generalized abstraction” - account, signature and fee abstraction baked into the protocol - so on-chain apps feel like ordinary Web2 apps.
Two audiences: developers building consumer apps, and brands adding on-chain features. XION cites 100+ brand integrations and millions of registered Meta Accounts, with users who need zero blockchain knowledge.
Crypto's usability wall - seed phrases, gas fees, wallet management, chain-hopping. Burnt removes each barrier rather than teaching users to climb it, aiming to onboard people who would never touch a wallet.
The core network. Generalized abstraction lives in the protocol itself, affecting accounts, signatures and fees so users interact through familiar Web2 methods.
Smart-contract accounts that let people sign up with email or biometrics - no private keys. Brands can onboard customers to on-chain apps for free.
USDC is the primary transaction currency and gas token, so users never hold a volatile native asset just to transact.
Native iOS and Android libraries with OAuth-like flows, opening XION to roughly 18 million mobile developers who never learned Solidity.
Most chains chase throughput or fees and still hand users a wallet. Burnt's wager is orthogonal: change the human experience, not the benchmark. Three choices set it apart -
1. Abstraction in the protocol. Rather than bolting wallet SDKs on top, XION embeds account, signature and fee abstraction into the base layer.
2. Stablecoin as gas. Paying fees in USDC removes the “buy our token first” tax that stalls most newcomers.
3. Consumer-first, not trader-first. The roadmap - Meta Accounts, a mobile kit named ‘Dave’ - is aimed at app builders and brands, not DeFi power users.
The $25M Series A - announced under the banner “make crypto disappear” - was led alongside Multicoin, Animoca Brands and Arrington Capital, with participation reported from Laser Digital (Nomura), Draper Dragon, Sfermion and GoldenTree.
A protocol company. Burnt builds the network and developer tooling, with value tied to network activity, transaction fees and the ecosystem token, while recruiting brands and developers to build on top. Venture-funded via Seed + Series A.
Consumer product design meets cryptography: account abstraction, signature-agnostic infrastructure, stablecoin payments and mobile SDKs - the unglamorous plumbing that hides blockchain from end users.
The consumer-crypto and chain-abstraction segment, competing with wallet-infra and abstraction players like Base, Privy, Dynamic, Magic, Sequence and NEAR - but positioned as a full Layer 1 rather than a middleware layer.
Anzalone burns a $95K Banksy on a livestream and sells the NFT for ~$382K, coining his alias and going viral.
He founds Burnt in New York as a Web3 foundry building decentralized infrastructure and developer tooling.
Burnt builds XION around generalized abstraction and launches its testnet in December.
XION closes a $25M Series A (April), pushing total funding past $36M, and goes live on mainnet with Meta Accounts and USDC payments.
The mobile development kit launches (June), targeting ~18 million mobile developers.
The XION network rebrands to Verona (verona.dev), keeping the invisible-crypto mission.
Founder talks and product context from the XION / Burnt team:
XION at the NYSE - Anthony Anzalone on mainstream adoption More XION / Burnt talks & demosBurnt is a New York Web3 company that builds XION (now Verona), a Layer 1 blockchain designed to be invisible to end users - no wallets, private keys or gas management - so mainstream people and brands can use on-chain apps like normal Web2 apps.
Anthony Anzalone, known in crypto as “Burnt Banksy,” founded the company in 2021 and serves as CEO. He first became known for burning a $95,000 Banksy artwork and selling the NFT.
More than $36 million total, including a $25 million Series A in April 2024, from investors such as Animoca Brands, Circle Ventures, Multicoin Capital and Arrington Capital.
It uses “generalized abstraction” built into the protocol: users sign in with email or biometrics via Meta Accounts, and transactions are paid in USDC, so no seed phrases or volatile native tokens are required.
Verona is the rebranded name of the XION network (as of 2026). It's the same Burnt-built Layer 1 and mission, under a new brand and token ticker.