web3
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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.
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.
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.
Cogni Put a Crypto Wallet Where the Checking Account Was
The New York fintech began with no-fee banking and a debit card. Then it placed self-custody, NFTs and a human-readable crypto address inside the same financial story - a revealing bet on how ordinary people might enter Web3.
Upright Ventures Wants Your Startup to Find Its First Users
The operator behind Celo Camp turns blockchain ecosystems into eight-week startup classrooms. Its most revealing bet is that a place inside a working wallet can matter as much as a polished investor pitch.
CV Labs puts a price on getting in the room
A CHF 29 day pass opens the door to Crypto Valley. Behind it, CV Labs runs a more ambitious business: helping blockchain founders find the people, discipline and capital to build a company.
EMURGO built Cardano’s front door. Now it has to help users leave.
The company behind Yoroi spent years turning Cardano into something people could use. A wallet security incident has put that commercial mission through its hardest test.
Brinc wants to get startups past the pitch
The Hong Kong accelerator began with the messy business of making hardware. Its next test is turning corporate introductions into working pilots - with very different prices for admission.
Nuclio builds startups. Then it builds the people.
The Barcelona venture builder recruits founders for business ideas tested abroad. Its bigger bet is that schools, headhunters and shared services can make the hard parts of starting up a little less lonely.
Gate sells access. Trust is the harder trade.
Thousands of tokens brought traders through Gate’s doors. A bigger financial supermarket now rests on a harder promise: making all that access worth trusting.
Parity built the machinery. Now comes the human part.
The engineers behind Polkadot spent a decade making blockchains work together. Their next test is whether people can use the result without needing a blockchain education.
Improbable learned to build companies, too
After a $502 million funding round and some painful lessons in virtual worlds, Improbable found another product: the companies built around its technology. Its latest chapter runs through AI, crypto and the decidedly real business of selling what it creates.
The Box That Pays You Back for the Bandwidth You Already Waste
No app, no monthly bill, no login screen. Deeper Network sells a matchbox-sized router that guards your whole home network and turns your leftover bandwidth into crypto - and it is one of the few DePIN projects with a product you can actually hold.
The NFT Toolkit That Became Takashi Murakami's Tech Shop
NiftyKit spent the NFT boom making smart contracts feel less like software engineering and more like a creative tool. Then Takashi Murakami's company bought the whole shop - and the public platform went dark.
Variant Bet on Ownership. Now It Wants to Fund Autonomy.
The New York venture firm made its name arguing that internet users should become owners. Its new $222 million fund stretches that idea into a broader test: does the technology give people more agency, or merely automate them?
Persist Is Running Founder Auditions With Real Startups on the Line
The Los Angeles venture studio does not ask would-be founders for another pitch deck. It asks them to build - then uses salary, equity and a shared operating bench to turn the strongest prototypes into companies.
The Blackstone Alum Betting That Wall Street Runs on Blockchain Next
Alex Marinier left private equity to write the earliest checks into blockchain finance. Six years and one Polymarket later, New Form Capital is raising again - and the institutions it once worked for are finally listening.
The Only Two Bets BlueYard Will Make: Utopia or Oblivion
BlueYard hands early-stage founders a check between $500K and $5M to chase problems most investors call radioactive - fusion reactors, hypersonic defense, decentralized money, engineered cells. Since 2016 it has backed Solana, Groq, IonQ and Filecoin from a partnership split between Berlin and the US.
How a Bought Domain and a Matt Damon Ad Built a 150-Million-User Crypto Empire
It bought one of the most valuable domains on the internet, put its name on a Los Angeles arena, and spent a decade with no outside investors. Then Citadel Securities showed up.
The Chicago Firm That Made a Business Out of Betting on the Boring Pipes of Finance
Spun out of one of the world's most secretive trading firms, Jump Capital has spent a decade quietly funding the infrastructure that markets, money, and software run on - and it prefers the unglamorous parts.
Outlander Capital Wants to Sell You the Blockchain Without You Ever Seeing It
The Dallas firm behind the "Invisible Wallet" is quietly converting patents, pop songs, and NFC tags into assets you can trade - and betting most people will never notice the blockchain underneath.
SoftConstruct Built the Casino, Then Started Selling the Shovels
The Yerevan tech group began with four people and a betting shop. Two decades later, its sprawling portfolio sells the platforms, feeds, payments and AI that keep digital gaming businesses moving.