There is a moment in almost every crypto app where people give up. They tap "deposit," and the app asks them to switch chains, bridge a token, approve a contract, and figure out why the USDC they hold looks nothing like the USDC the app wants. Most users close the tab. Timothy Chung has spent the better part of a decade staring at that exact moment, and with his new company, Unifold, he is trying to erase it.
Chung is the co-founder and CEO of Unifold, a New York startup in Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch. The pitch is short enough to fit on a napkin: let any app accept on-chain deposits, across any chain and any token, in fewer than ten lines of code. The work behind that sentence is not short at all.
A habit of showing up early
Chung studied computer science at Columbia and Cambridge, but the more telling detail is the timing of the rooms he has walked into. He was the fourth engineer at Instabase, back when the company was still small enough to count its engineers on one hand. He was around Polymarket in its early days, before prediction markets became dinner-table conversation. And out of MIT, he co-led an initiative to build a central bank digital currency for the Marshall Islands - a national-scale experiment in what money could look like when it is born digital.
The through-line is not luck. It is a preference for being present at the start of things, when the architecture is still soft and a single engineer can shape the direction. That instinct would eventually pull him toward the least glamorous layer of crypto: the plumbing that moves money in.
Streambird, and a lesson in what people actually praise
Before Unifold, Chung co-founded Streambird with Quang Huynh, a wallet-as-a-service and identity platform. It was acquired by MoonPay, where the technology became MoonPay Wallets. In that chapter, Chung and his team helped onboard more than 30 million users and supported some of the most-used names in the space, including Phantom and Polymarket.
Onboarding tens of millions of people teaches you where they stumble. It also teaches you what they love. And what people kept loving, it turned out, was not the flashy part of the product. It was the deposit flow - the quiet handoff where money enters the app.
The request that became a company
After leaving the acquiring company, the team built a consumer prediction market of their own. Users kept singling out the same thing: depositing was easy. Then came the moment founders wait for. A top prediction market - ranked third in weekly transactions behind Kalshi and Polymarket as of February 2026 - asked if it could get access to that deposit flow.
A feature other builders are asking to borrow is not a feature anymore. It is a product. Unifold was born from that request, reframing the deposit experience as infrastructure that any team could plug in rather than rebuild.
The early reactions read less like testimonials and more like reflexes. A head of engineering at Alpha Arcade, a prediction market on Algorand, put it plainly after moving funds from a Solana wallet to an Algorand one: "VERY smooth!!" When users react to payment infrastructure with exclamation points, something unusual is happening.
What Unifold actually does
Under the hood, Unifold is a developer-first API and SDK that hides an enormous amount of complexity: cross-chain routing, gas abstraction, compliance checks, and settlement, wrapped around both crypto and fiat deposits. It ships for web, React Native, iOS and Kotlin. The promise to a developer is that all of it disappears behind a small, boring integration.
import { Unifold } from '@unifold/sdk'
const deposit = Unifold.accept({
anyChain: true,
anyToken: true,
settleTo: 'your-treasury'
})
// < 10 lines. the mess is Unifold's problem now.
The target customers are the products where deposit friction hurts most: prediction markets, perpetual exchanges, DeFi protocols, and fintechs. These are time-sensitive applications, where a user who hesitates at the deposit screen is often a user who never comes back. Early ecosystem partners include Algorand, MegaETH and Thru.
The path in one line each
Three founders, one modal
Chung does not build Unifold alone. Quang Huynh, his Streambird co-founder, brings years of consumer crypto and fintech work in authentication, mobile apps and the kind of UX polish that quietly onboards millions. Hau Chu, a Cornell Tech graduate and former Solana Labs developer, has been building blockchain infrastructure since 2023 and has scaled wallet and DeFi systems across more than ten chains. Between them, the team has already lived the problem they are now selling the solution to.
There is a certain discipline in choosing to work on the invisible layer. The best infrastructure is the kind nobody thinks about until it breaks. Chung seems comfortable there - building the part of the product that earns no applause when it works, only silence, which in payments is the highest compliment you can get.
It is early. Unifold is a young company with a young batch stamp and a demo that makes engineers say "holy." But the shape of the bet is clear, and it fits the person making it: take the ugliest, most-avoided corner of an industry, treat it as a first-class product, and make the complexity somebody else's problem. Chung has been early before. He is betting he is early again.