Alliance DAO graduates are often a useful indicator of investor appetite and user adaptation trends in the cryptocurrency space. The latest batch of stage-agnostic crypto accelerators announced today comes at a moment of great excitement for a recovering market.
Just two months ago, Bitcoin hit an all-time high. Although the value of the largest cryptocurrency has fallen since then, it continues to trade at much higher levels than during the market downturn that followed the FTX blowout in late 2022. Venture investors have responded by pouring money into Web3 startups, with roughly the total amount of funding in this space going to: The first quarter was $1.9 billion, a 58% jump from the previous quarter, according to Crunchbase data.
The renewed enthusiasm among Web3 believers is evidenced by catchphrases like “We’re back” that filled CryptocurrencyX/Twitter. Meanwhile, regulators' efforts to rein in the industry continue unabated. In the United States, Binance's Canadian founder Changpeng “CZ” Chao is on track to become the richest person ever imprisoned. Uniswap, which has been vocal about its decentralized approach to digital assets, received a notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last month.
Unsurprisingly, the ongoing repression in the United States has had a clear impact on the geographical composition of Alliance DAO.
Image credit: Alliance DAO
As shown in the graph (above) shared by Qiao Wang, one of Alliance DAO's founding partners, 45% of accelerator applicants in the second half of 2021 were founders based in North America. Its share fell to just 26% in the first half of this year.
“Essentially, the U.S. has been losing market share for crypto founders over the past three years. This is likely due to 1) regulation and 2) the product market fit of cryptocurrencies to emerging markets. This is likely the cause,” Wang told TechCrunch via email.
Indeed, interest from Asia in this accelerator has steadily increased, accounting for 24% of all applications in the first half of 2024, compared to 14% in the second half of 2021.
The decline in North American participation in Alliance DAO does not mean that the founders will simply abandon their crypto dreams. Historically, Web3 entrepreneurs have been a flexible, nomadic tribe, fleeing oppression and seeking more favorable regions. As a result, some companies may establish physical locations in emerging markets with more friendly crypto environments.
As reported by TechCrunch, Asia has quickly become a popular destination for crypto entrepreneurs. The user base is large, young, and open to new types of technology and financial assets. Several jurisdictions, including Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, have taken notable steps to provide clearer regulatory frameworks for emerging sectors, and in the face of policy uncertainty elsewhere. This provides a great sense of security to the founders who are currently working with us.
meet the batch
Alliance DAO's latest cohort, the 12th edition of the three-month program, received 1,503 applications. This is a significant increase from his 1,083 applications in the previous batch. This time only 21 teams were accepted, and the acceptance rate was 1.4%. Twelve of them will be on stage today at Demo Day.
Projects built on Ethereum, the blockchain with the most developer activity, remain the focus of this cohort, according to Wang, but other ecosystems such as Solana and Bitcoin are also “seeing a resurgence.” It is said that Popular verticals seen across the batch include decentralized AI, crypto infrastructure (particularly modular blockchain), decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto-based payment solutions.
Now let's talk about the project:
Company name: Vilcaso
Content: Unauthorized U.S. Real Estate Investments
Founder: Nathaniel Sokoll-Ward, Val Lee
The pitch: REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) are designed to provide investors with partial exposure to real estate and lower barriers to entry. Although REITs are more liquid than traditional real estate investments, they are largely inaccessible to global investors, who make up a growing portion of total U.S. real estate investments. Vilcaso is working to scale using “fully legal, permissionless tokens.” Distribute fractional ownership of U.S. real estate to people around the world. The company holds small equity positions in numerous homes across the country.
Stage: Grow seeds
Company name: Go Bankless
What: Transferwise with stablecoins
Founders: Igor Francisco, Kayaretu Mushari
The pitch: GoBankless focuses on Africa's exploding cross-border payments market. Businesses suffer from the long processing times and high payment fees of traditional banks, while banks resisting SWIFT's monopoly are left facing counterparty risk in the shadow market. The startup works to use stablecoins to enable instant cross-border payments without the need for banking intermediaries. Currently, GoBankless serves approximately 50 small and medium-sized businesses in Mozambique and South Africa, and settles $7 million in payments each month.
Stage: Grow seeds
Company name: Wasabi Protocol
Feature: Leveraged trading protocol
Founder: Ellen Darman, Kemal Hasan Atay
The pitch: Cryptocurrency trading, especially long-tail trading of new assets such as meme coins and NFTs, has seen a surge in daily trading volumes. Popular platforms such as Aevo and Hyperliquid allow users to gain early access, but are “dependent on sufficient market liquidity,” leading to missed opportunities. Wasabi solves liquidity by backing users' positions with underlying assets, whereas competitors take algorithmic approaches. Wasabi's Total Value Locked (TVL), launched a few months ago, has grown to $60 million in trading volume of over $200 million.
Stage: We recently closed a seed round.Strategic round increase
Company name: Lulubit
Contents: Coinbase for Central America
Founders: Ianil Soniz, Diego Hernán Cabrera, Alan Futerman
The pitch: Central America is one of the fastest growing regions for crypto adoption. Nevertheless, just buying and selling cryptocurrencies remains difficult in this region. P2P networks are unreliable and established exchanges charge high fees. Lulubit allows individual users in Central America to buy and sell cryptocurrencies from their local banks and spend them through crypto debit cards issued by the company. A user can also send money to his Lulubit on-chain and withdraw it to a bank account at a lower rate than traditional methods. In less than a year since its launch, Lulubit has gained over 18,000 users and recorded over $1.3 million in processing volume in April alone, growing 36% month over month.
Stage: Grow seeds
Company name: ZwapX
What: Tokenized Watch Marketplace
Founder: Johann Chiovetta Noah ChiobettaRocco di Capua
The pitch: The multi-billion dollar luxury watch market is huge, yet under-innovated. Peer-to-peer marketplaces are rife with fraud, and B2C platforms face online authentication challenges. ZwapX provides a way for users to trade physical watches in the form of tokens that serve as proof of ownership and authenticity. So far he has tokenized 44 watches, TVL has reached his $1.4 million, and volume has reached his $240,000.
Stage: Grow seeds
Company name: Fractal Payments
What: Cross-border payments for global businesses
Founder: Pavel Skarin
The pitch: Corporate money transfers is one of the world's largest industries, but it still suffers from persistent problems such as high fees and slow processing times. Fractal Payments is another startup aiming to disrupt SWIFT using stablecoins. It is fully licensed in the European Union and claims to be able to make cross-border payments via traditional banking rails 3x cheaper and 6x faster. This has resulted in over $5 million in payments and works with a network of partners supporting payments in over 60 countries.
Stage: Grow seeds
Company name: Codigo
Feature: Cryptographic data for AI training
Founders: Jean-Philippe Emery Marcos, Diego Besprosban, Jaziel Guerrero
The pitch: AI training data is a billion-dollar market opportunity that has created unicorns like Scale AI. However, existing solutions mainly focus on Web2 use cases, and few solutions power AI training with encrypted data. Código provides highly curated datasets to train specialized models for high-stakes crypto applications such as financial trading. Data is collected automatically through crowdsourcing and then subjected to a decentralized review and enrichment process, where reviews can earn tokens. This tool helped him generate 4,000 dApps and 4 million lines of code within 6 months.
Stage: Grow seeds
Company name: Acru
What: Stablecoin payment network for Africa
Founders: Clinton Mba, Adesuwa Omoruyi
The pitch: Bank transfers in Africa are notorious for having high fees and being time-consuming. Accrue aims to build a payments network that enables instant and affordable transactions, all powered by stablecoins. To that end, the startup is leveraging the continent's existing mobile teller network, which allows users to carry out banking transactions via their mobile phones, often through text messages. “10% of these mobile tellers are familiar with stablecoins” and they are joining Accrue because it offers more profit sharing and future tokens. The startup was cash flow positive and processed $5 million in payments.
Stage: Grow seeds
Company name: Fig Investments
Content: Tokenization of hedge fund strategies
Founder: Guanzhi Ma, Tony Qian
The pitch: Interest in decentralized finance (DeFi) services is increasing from traditional finance (TradFi), with institutional investors like BlackRock tokenizing their stocks. Founded by banking industry veterans, Fig offers an automated trading desk that “matches TradFi’s crypto interests with the interests of on-chain LPs.” It claims to be 10 times the size of its competitors. Since launching four months ago, TVL has increased to his $10 million, and he has an additional $40 million outstanding.
Stage: Grow seeds
Company name: 0G
Feature: Modular AI Chain
Founder: Michael Heinrich, Ming Wu
The pitch: 0G is built on the hottest areas of modular blockchains aimed at helping scale up Ethereum transactions. Specifically, 0G acts as a data availability layer, ensuring that nodes in a blockchain network can access and verify transaction data. That focus puts it in direct competition with well-funded projects such as a16z-backed EigenLayer, industry leader Celestia, and Avail, born out of Polygon. 0G claims that by using proprietary technology, it can achieve his 50,000x faster performance than Celestia while costing 100 times less than its competitors.
Stage: We recently closed a pre-seed round that was over 20x oversubscribed.grow seeds
Company name: Proto
Feature: On-chain Google Maps
Founder: Akshay Yereswarapu
The pitch: Despite the ubiquity of Google Maps, the application is shockingly inaccurate in developing countries, where urban density is much higher and urban development is occurring more rapidly than in Western cities. is. Proto hopes to make navigation in underserved markets more accurate by crowdsourcing mapping data and making it easy for contributors to upload images on their mobile phones. This process is encouraged by token rewards. Proto, which launched in late January, has achieved 75% of Google Maps' coverage of Bangalore through its network of 400 users.
Stage: Grow seeds
Company name: Dinari
What: A global tokenized stock exchange
Founders: Gabriel Otte, Chas Lampenthal, Jake Timothy
The pitch: Global demand for U.S. securities is surging, but access remains quite limited. Traditional brokerages have high barriers to entry for foreign users, while early attempts to tokenize securities, such as Ondo, have limited certain functionality. Dinari, which is registered with the SEC, offers a way for non-US investors to purchase stocks via stablecoins. Its unique advantage is that its tokens are backed by real-world stocks. His TVL on this platform increased to his $500,000.
Stage: Closed $10 million seed round.Series A development
Alliance DAO invites various cryptocurrency experts to speak to the group about their knowledge in their field. This year's guest mentors include Jacquelyn Melinek, founder of Token Relations and former crypto reporter for TechCrunch. Jason Janowitz, Founder of Blockworks. Ming Ng, founder of Jupiter. Greg DiPrisco, founder of Ajna and M^0 Labs. Soon Yun “SY” Lee, Founder of Story Protocol. David Vorick, founder of Sia and Glow. The founders of Tensor are Ilja Moisejevs and Richard Wu.