web3
(265)
Daniel Wang and the price of pressing play
Before he co-founded Aethir, Daniel Wang helped take League of Legends across borders. Now he is working on a different barrier to entry: who gets access to the computers behind games and AI.
Manav Gupta and the distance between an idea and a business
Before Brinc became a global venture accelerator, Manav Gupta learned the awkward business of getting things made. He has spent the years since helping other founders cross the same gap.
Alon Shavit and the art of opening doors
Before he helped founders find mentors and markets, Alon Shavit programmed a robot to open a gate. At Upright Ventures, the engineering problem has become a human one.
Pi Network has the crowd. Now comes the economy.
A daily tap brought millions of people into Pi Network. Its harder experiment is turning that habit into apps, payments, and things worth coming back for.
Jutta Steiner and the trouble with trust
A question about online privacy took Jutta Steiner from applied mathematics to Ethereum’s security team and the co-founding of Parity Technologies. Her story follows the awkward distance between a promising idea and software people can depend on.
Kate Laurence Wants Trust to Survive the People in Charge
Growing up in Russia gave Kate Laurence a reason to question institutions. A career at Gartner gave her a way to question technology. At Bloccelerate VC, she has made a business of doing both.
Gavin Wood and the problem with being in charge
He helped build Ethereum, gave Web3 its name and created Polkadot. Gavin Wood keeps returning to a more awkward question: how much power should any one person have?
Sweet gives fandom something to do.
A highlight can sit in a wallet forever. Sweet is betting that fans would rather put it to work - collecting, competing, and earning a reason to come back.
Prakash Somosundram and the business of bringing people together
From a Singapore digital agency to blockchain games and climate finance, Prakash Somosundram kept returning to the same problem: how to bring people, ideas and capital together. His next chapter begins with a harder look at what happens after the money arrives.
Wilson Bright and the question behind the questionnaire
Before Wilson Bright built BlockSurvey, he wanted to know who could read the answers. His journey from software testing to private surveys now includes AI agents, university research, and a rather useful cardboard box.
Joshua D. Tobkin puts a price on being right
A whitepaper club in San Francisco became a research lab in Taipei, then Supra. Joshua D. Tobkin’s path runs through poker, blockchain design, and a personal token bounty for anyone who could beat his team’s execution engine.
Pengyu Wang and the price of one extra click
The Particle Network co-founder brought a casual-game builder’s eye to crypto’s awkward front door. His work now stretches from familiar logins to accounts that can move across blockchains without making the user manage every step.
Derek Chiang and the price of one more click
A basketball-inspired collectibles startup brought Derek Chiang face to face with crypto’s awkward front door. At ZeroDev, and now Ethlabs, he has kept working on what happens between a promising technology and a person willing to use it.
Jake Brukhman and the value of joining in
A programmer raised by computer scientists turned a blockchain research group into CoinFund. His next question is whether the same networks can help people build and own artificial intelligence.
Cliel Schachter and the value of going first
Before leading teams, Cliel Schachter has a habit of becoming a customer. From a catering shift in San Francisco to a venture studio in Toronto, his career follows the questions that only using a product can answer.
Nathan Montone and the year-long conversation about the future
An early Bitcoin investor found a co-founder in institutional finance. At M31 Capital, Nathan Montone has spent the years since connecting unconventional technology bets with the practical business of making them work.
Blockwave Labs and the business of making money move
First came wallets, then loyalty points, then trading vaults. Now the Seoul builder is bringing its blockchain experience to the less glamorous business of payments and settlement.
Draper University teaches founders to fail before investors pay for it
Tim Draper built a school around an awkward lesson: a promising idea can survive a bad pitch, but it cannot survive indifference. In San Mateo, residential training now sits beside blockchain accelerators with cash, equity terms and a deadline.
Monad wants your code. It would rather skip the queue.
The blockchain built by trading engineers keeps Ethereum’s familiar contracts and rearranges the machinery beneath them. Its next test is whether faster settlement makes money more useful.
InfStones sells the luxury of sleeping through the night
Behind a blockchain’s promise of independence sits a surprisingly ordinary job: keeping computers running. InfStones built a business around taking that job off other people’s hands.
Truth Arts wants you to love an ugly goblin
A free NFT mint gave Goblintown its audience. Truth Arts is testing whether that audience will follow its monsters into games, merchandise, and a much longer story.
Avalanche wants to give business a chain of its own
FIFA wanted more control over its digital collectibles. Avalanche’s answer was a blockchain FIFA could call its own - and a cheaper way for the next business to follow.
RoofStacks: What Happens After the Ticket Sells
A travel-software business grew into a family of banking, gaming and cloud ventures. The revealing part of RoofStacks is how often those apparently unrelated businesses need the same things.
Alchemy and the art of disappearing
A blockchain app needs someone to do the unglamorous work. Alchemy turned that chore into a business, then discovered that even an infrastructure company must choose what to leave to somebody else.
The People Who Teach the Machines
PublicAI began by paying people to record their voices. Now it wants the messy trail of real coding work - errors, retries and all - because polished answers leave out how the work got done.
Greg Solano Wrote a Club Into Existence. Now He Gets to Write Again.
The Yuga Labs co-founder turned a joke about bored crypto millionaires into Bored Ape Yacht Club. After two years back in the CEO chair, he has handed daily operations to Michael Figge and returned to the writing and creative direction that started it all.
Sidney Zhang’s Road Back to Crypto Ran Through a Sailboat
He spent his first crypto years building products that vanished almost as quickly as they appeared. After a detour through Uber Eats and Facebook AI, an old friend from Melbourne brought him back to build Magic Eden.
Mo Shaikh and the Missing Forty Dollars
A Brooklyn taxi fare first made Mo Shaikh curious about where money goes. After a real estate experiment and a blockchain born from Meta’s abandoned Diem project, he is putting that question to work as an investor.
Kerem Atalay Built the Door to the Bored Ape Club
Before Bored Ape Yacht Club became a cultural shorthand, Kerem Atalay and Zeshan Ali had to make its website, smart contracts and members-only spaces work together. The co-founder known online as Emperor Tomato Ketchup helped turn a peculiar club into functioning code.
Brandon Millman and the Trouble With Crypto's Front Door
A former Twitter and 0x engineer saw that crypto's first screen was often its hardest. With Phantom, he turned a wallet into an argument about how ordinary people should enter a complicated world.