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It’s only the second week of 2023, but Demo Day has already begun as founders try to maintain momentum in the ever-changing crypto market.
Beacon, an early-stage accelerator program focused on Web3, launched last year and its flagship cohort has just graduated. The first cohort of teams, known as Cohort 0, presented their ideas on Tuesday’s Demo Day, which was exclusively covered by TechCrunch.
“For Cohort 0, we talked to over 1,000 projects and ended up with 15 companies in Cohort 0, 13 of whom graduated at Demo Day,” said Sandeep Nailwal, lead Beacon contributor and co-founder of Polygon. told TechCrunch. “At the current application rate for Cohort 1, similar he is expected to land with a 1% approval rate.”
The three-month program runs twice a year and receives approximately 15-20 applicants for the fall and spring cohorts.
“We feel that Cohort 0 is Beacon’s MVP,” said Nailwal. “So for this cohort, we picked our favorite teams by calling founders who were sourced through our network.”
Mentors include Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden. A handful of venture capitalists. Halborn co-founder Rob Behnke. Brendan Farmer, co-leader of Polygon Zero. Dan Kim, Vice President of Business Development and Listings at Coinbase. Miles Anthony, CEO and co-founder of Decentral Games, to name a few.
The next cohort will have a standard $250,000 investment, with Beacon valuing each company in the program at $8 million, Nailwal said. In Cohort 0, he added, the investment was made on a case-by-case basis as the team was refining that process.
Beacon is “chain-agnostic,” which means most teams in Cohort 0 were building cross-chain applications, Nailwal said. However, Ethereum topped the list of the most teams building on its blockchain: Beacon core contributor and Symbolic Capital co-founder Kenzi Wang said of 13 companies. Of those, he told Demo Day that he had 29 founders in 13 cities in nine countries.
The startup focused on various crypto sub-sectors including gaming, infrastructure, decentralized lending and borrowing, and developer tools. Nearly all startups in the cohort are at seed stage, except for his one in Series A, Community Gaming.
Here are the details behind the 13 startups in Cohort 0:
company name: Arcana
- Feature: Web3 Toolkit for Developers
- Founders: Mayur Relekar, Aravindh Kumar
- Stage: Seed
- The pitch: Arcana wants to complement its tech stack for developers with tools that help build secure decentralized applications (dApps). Its core tools include user authentication, data storage in distributed networks, and access control. The platform aims to give developers building applications on “nearly any chain” the ability to leverage its services and tools.
company name: blink moon
- What it does: Game development studio
- Founders: Hugh Beluzy, Hajir Majinani
- Stage: Seed
- Pitch: Blinkmoon is building an independent game development studio to focus on the growing web3 sector. Prior to this, members of that team helped create visuals for ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Game of Thrones’, as well as working on game franchises like League of Legends: Wild Rift, NBA. , Dead Rising, Rainbow Six. Please name a few.
company name: Chapter 10
- What it does: Web3 Event Experience
- Founder: Chase Guo
- Stage: Seed
- Pitch: ChapterX is a web3 event experience platform that aims to give organizers the ability to turn their events into unique experiences. The startup offers options to engage attendees through physical events or customizable virtual worlds in the metaverse, with aspects such as decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance and GameFi. Users can also transform his 2D NFT into his 3D avatar through the reskin system, discover new worlds through the network and join the community.
company name: Corexion
- What it does: GameFi ecosystem
- Founder: Abhay Aggarwal
- Stage: Seed
- The pitch: Colexion is a card-based GameFi ecosystem that aims to bring Web 2.0 games to the web3 ecosystem through fantasy-focused content. Its system, Colexion Core, provides a plethora of services such as mints, marketplaces, bridges and wallets to help traditional games navigate the web3 world. According to its website, the company is focused on the Asia-Pacific region, where he has over 15 million active his users in more than 10 countries. Colexion is backed by Polygon, Brevan Howard, Jump Capital, Symbolic Capital, Firestarter and GSR.
company name: community games
- What it does: esports platform
- Founder: Chris Gonsalves
- Stage: Series A
- The Pitch: Community Gaming aims to be an all-in-one esports competition platform that provides infrastructure for industry players. Backed by Ethereum and Solana-based blockchain payment technology, the platform offers players, organizers and game developers the tools to create, promote and participate in esports tournaments. It also gives users the ability to monetize their gameplay by completing quests, a daily content engine for earning and game discovery.
company name: cubist
- What it does: Web3 developer tools and infrastructure
- Founders: Ann Stefan, Deian Stefan, Riad Wahby, Fraser Brown
- Stage: Seed
- Pitch: Cubist is a developer tools and infrastructure provider aimed at bringing today’s software engineering practices and security to web3 builders. Its toolkit focuses on providing safer and more secure options so developers can easily build, test and deploy across multi-chain and cross-chain dApps. Its founders include former fintech COO and computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and his UC San Diego. Team members have spent their careers refining security for real-world systems, compiling and publishing over 80 research papers on related topics such as computer systems, programming languages, security, and cryptography.
company name: passing lane
- What it does: MEV solutions for Ethereum-based blockchains and rollups
- Founders: Alex Watts, Jordan Hagan
- Stage: Seed
- The Pitch: The FastLane Protocol Generates Revenue for Validators, Increases Efficacy for Algorithmic Traders, and Reduces Frustration for Network Participants When Overwhelmed by Redundant Transactions Without the Need to Install or Manage Custom Software on Validation Nodes focus on doing. The protocol aims to reduce transaction spam and improve the overall health of the Ethereum network by monetizing the propagation bottleneck of the layer 2 blockchain Polygon and distributing rewards to participating validators. .
company name: meta ape
- What it does: Web3 games
- Founders: Taylor Shim, Nicholas Kerr
- Stage: Seed
- The Pitch: Meta Apes is a free-to-play, win-win mobile Web3 game built on the BNB Application Sidechain (BAS). Players can build their own cities and communities while competing and exploring with other players to win the “race to space”. The game aims to combine traditional game elements such as massively multiplayer online (MMO) strategy with web3 elements such as in-game currency. The team has worked for Ubisoft, Gameloft, Zynga, AppLovin, Epic, and more.
company name: mystic mousse
- What it does: Web3 game developer
- Founder: Mike Levine
- Stage: Seed
- The Pitch: Mystic Moose is a web3 platform, game studio and publisher formed by a team of gaming veterans who have worked at Activision, LucasArts and Electronic Arts. Its first game, Planet Mojo, is a browser-based server of interconnected games built on top of the scalable backend platform Sumatra. The company’s automated chess game, Mojo Melee, is currently in alpha playtesting and will be fully released on browser and mobile in the first quarter of this year. The studio is backed by Animoca Brands, Republic Crypto, Polygon Studios and more.
company name: Nirion
- What it does: Web3 Infrastructure
- Founders: Alex Page, Andrew Yeo, Andrew Massant
- Stage: Seed
- The pitch: Nillion is a web3 infrastructure startup focused on securing storage, computation and fragmentation of data on the internet. “Nillion is a deep technology infrastructure project,” Andrew Yeoh, the company’s founder and chief marketing officer, previously told TechCrunch. “While blockchain decentralizes finance, Nillion aims to decentralize everything else and the rest of the data.” Founders include former Uber, Indiegogo, Hedera Hashgraph employees, and Coinbase and Nike executives. The company said in December 2022 he had raised more than 150 investors to raise more than his $20 million and made a “conscious decision” to prevent ownership concentration, according to Nillion CEO Alex Page. said in a statement.
company name: Davos Protocol
- What it does: Stable asset lending protocol
- Founders: Varun Satyam, Julian Hayward, Filipe Gonsalves
- Stage: Seed
- Claims: The Davos Protocol is home to DAVOS, a stable asset that is stabilized by a monetary policy that balances yield generation and price stability on a weekly basis by leveraging liquid staking, according to its website. Users can borrow DAVOS against liquid staking tokens as collateral. Users can also offer stable asset pairs to provide liquidity, spawn farms and earn rewards. The team aims to drive mainstream adoption of blockchain technology by incentivizing borrowers and investors through its protocol. Its strategic partners include Polygon and Ankr.
company name: time swap
- What it does: Decentralized lending and borrowing protocol
- Founders: Ameeth Devadas, Harshita Singh, Ricsson Ngo
- Stage: Seed
- Pitch: Timeswap is a decentralized lending and borrowing platform and automated market maker (AMM) protocol powered by Polygon. Its main features include flexible interest rates and collateral factors, allowing users to flexibly determine their risk-return profile, as well as providing adequate liquidity to allow users to use any of his Ethereum Will be able to create his ERC20 token pool on the base. Since its launch in August 2020, the platform has executed over $4 million in lending, borrowing and liquidity volumes on the protocol without token incentives, according to an August post.
company name: Iride
- Feature: Decentralized protocol for wallet communication
- Founders: Ignat Shapkin, Kirill Zubkov, Danila Simonov
- Stage: Seed
- The pitch: Ylide is a decentralized protocol for inter-wallet communication that enables multi-chain messaging, data storage in smart contracts, and end-to-end encryption. It also has its own email client and tools for developers to integrate communication into their projects, making it “as easy as building a Lego set,” the team said.
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