Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
In the early hours of this morning Beijing time, a16z Crypto partner Jason Rosenthal announced on X the 21 projects selected for the a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX) fall program.
According to the official description of a16z Crypto, the projects selected for this accelerator program come from 11 different countries, including Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Japan, Poland, Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States (including Puerto Rico). The project categories cover all stacks of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, including AI, DeFi, infrastructure, as well as photo sharing, mapping and other C-end applications.
In the next 8 weeks, this batch of projects will receive guidance from top investors and founders in the CSX Accelerator, and take this opportunity to establish connections with a16z's vast ecosystem network. More importantly, a16z will invest at least $500,000 in each selected project through CSX.
The following is a brief introduction to the 21 projects in this batch (sorted by the first letter of the project).
Anera Labs
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/intheanera
Positioning: DeFi
CSX’s one-sentence introduction: Building a liquidity infrastructure that unifies full-chain liquidity.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
Banyan
Project or founder social media: Not sure yet
Positioning: AI
CSX's one-sentence introduction: Using artificial intelligence to bridge the communication gap at work and improve business operating efficiency.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
Blocksense
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/blocksense_
Positioning: Oracle
CSX’s one-sentence introduction: Makes it possible to create oracles that can leverage Internet data and CPU/GPU computing.
Whether it has been financed: Yes
Blocksense announced today that it has completed a $4 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was led by Permutation, with participation from a16z's Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX), Scott Moore, Public Works, Tykhe Block Ventures, Selini Capital, and MH Ventures.
It is understood that Blocksense is a ZK Rollup-based oracle solution that reduces high costs through tightly packaged data blocks, introduces a transparent fee model, and provides fully decentralized, permissionless data feeds, aiming to revolutionize the oracle network. Anyone can become a data provider on the network by staking BlockSense tokens, and the node will automatically perform all reporting tasks by obtaining the appropriate oracle script and broadcasting its results to the BlockSense network.
Cork Protocol
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/Corkprotocol
Positioning: DeFi
CSX’s one-sentence description: A risk pricing protocol designed to accelerate the development of on-chain credit.
Whether it has been financed: Yes
Cork Protocol announced today that it has completed its seed round of financing. Investors include Orange DAO, Founderheads, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Outliers Fund, Unbounded Capital, Steakhouse Financial and more than 20 angel investors. The investment amount was not disclosed. Cork aims to expand and accelerate the development of on-chain credit by helping market participants price and hedge risks.
DOT
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/dotdotfan
Positioning: Games
CSX’s one-sentence description: Transforms user-created pixel art into on-chain game components.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
Fermah
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/fermah_xyz
Positioning: ZK infrastructure
CSX’s one-sentence introduction: Building a universal zero-knowledge proof generation layer.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
Future Primitive
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/futureprimitive
Positioning: C-end application
CSX's one-sentence introduction: A photo-based Internet social platform.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
Kuzco
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/kuzco_xyz
Positioning: AI
One sentence introduction of CSX: LLM Reasoning Market.
Whether it has been financed: Yes
Kuzco’s official website has not disclosed any financing information, but Frictionless Capital mentioned that it had invested in Kuzco when announcing its new fund. According to the VC’s official website, tracing back to relevant social media information, it can be verified that the Kuzco it invested in is the same project selected by CSX this time.
According to public information, Kuzco is a distributed GPU cluster built on the Solana blockchain, designed to facilitate efficient and economical reasoning for large language models (LLMs) such as Llama 3, Mistral, and Phi 3.
MeshMap
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/meshmapxyz
Positioning: C-end application
CSX in one sentence: Building a 3D world map and AR content network.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
Opacity Labs
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/OpacityNetwork
Positioning: Privacy
CSX’s one-sentence introduction: Using zkTLS to implement privacy verification for Web2 data.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
In light of historical developments, Opacity Labs has been integrated into EigenLayer and has become one of the mainnet AVS services, allowing users to generate proof of their data on existing Web2 platforms, thereby advancing the realization of user data sovereignty.
OpenGradient
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/OpenGradient
Positioning: AI
CSX's one-sentence introduction: Building a blockchain that brings computing power on-chain.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
According to the description on OpenGradient’s official website, the project positions itself as a “native intelligent network that supports sovereign AI.”
PIN AI
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/PINAI_IO
Positioning: AI
CSX’s one-sentence introduction: Building a personal AI open platform (data + agent).
Whether it has been financed: Yes
PIN AI has completed a $10 million seed round of financing today, led by a16z Crypto. PIN AI is an AI infrastructure company that is developing the world's first open source Personal Intelligence Network (PIN), which aims to transform smartphones into privacy-focused AI personal assistants, giving users full control and ownership of their own personal AI.
Pod Network
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/poddotnetwork
Positioning: Layer 1
CSX’s one sentence introduction: A new L1 primitive with no blocks, no leader nodes, and a broadened notion of transaction total ordering.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
World
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/joinsekai
Positioning: Content, IP
CSX's one-sentence introduction: Makes it easier to create, share, and monetize interactive stories.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
After a brief trial, I found Sekai to be a bit like a picture version of Story (there is also cooperation between the two), allowing multiple users to collaborate to create a picture and text version of the story.
Skyfire
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/trySkyfire
Positioning: AI
CSX’s one-sentence description: An open payment protocol that enables AI agents to pay for anything.
Whether it has been financed: Yes
In August this year, Skyfire, founded by former Ripple executives, announced the completion of a $8.5 million seed round of financing to provide encrypted payment solutions for AI agents. Investors in this round of financing include USDC issuer Circle, Ripple, Gemini, and the venture capital firm of Tim Draper, a well-known Silicon Valley billionaire and Bitcoin advocate.
Skyfire has developed an open source payment system that allows autonomous AI agents to conduct various transactions on the Internet, including the purchase of data storage, creative assets, air tickets, and daily necessities. Its payment network runs on the USDC stablecoin and is currently deployed on the Polygon network, with plans to expand to other blockchains in the future.
Suave
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/suave_money_
Positioning: DeFi
CSX’s one-sentence introduction: Enables DApps to accept any token from any wallet on any blockchain.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
t 1 protocol
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/t1protocol
Positioning: Ethereum expansion
CSX’s one-sentence introduction: Generate proofs in real time to ensure the consistency of Ethereum’s state.
Whether it has been financed: Yes
Ethereum scaling solution t 1 protocol announced today that it has completed a $2.5 million pre-seed round of financing, with participation from a16z Crypto Startup School (CSX), Espresso, Frax, CowSwap, ETHGlobal, ENSO, INJECTIVE, and angel investors such as Guy Wuollet, AliYahya, and Eric Chen. It is reported that the t 1 protocol aims to provide a scaling solution for Ethereum and support real-time proof generation to ensure the unity of Ethereum's state.
I am silent
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/TACEO_IO
Positioning: ZK infrastructure
CSX’s one-sentence introduction: Providing MPC encrypted computing for Web3.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
Previously, TACEO was selected as one of the first 17 award-winning projects in the Worldcoin Community Grant Program. Earlier, Nil Foundation worked with TACEO to use ZK technology to verify machine learning (ML) models on the Ethereum mainnet, enabling machine learning to operate in smart contracts without the need for third-party trust.
Term Labs
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/term_labs
Positioning: DeFi
CSX one-sentence description: A DeFi lending platform that matches borrowers and lenders at a fixed interest rate.
Whether it has been financed: Yes
In February 2023, Term Labs announced the completion of a new round of financing of US$2.5 million, led by Electric Capital, with participation from Circle Ventures, MEXC Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and others. The new funds will be used to build DeFi fixed-rate products.
In May 2024, Term Labs announced again under the protocol name Term Finance that it had completed a US$5.5 million strategic round of financing, led by Electric Capital, with participation from Arete Capital, Delta Blockchain Fund, Inception Capital, Blizzard Fund, Maelstrom and others. The new funds will be used to develop the protocol and accelerate Term's roadmap to simplify lending through features such as recycling, passive lending, automation and real-time alerts.
vlayer labs
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/vlayer_xyz
Positioning: ZK infrastructure
CSX’s one-sentence introduction: Trustless, verifiable data infrastructure powered by zero-knowledge proofs.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
zkSpin
Project or founder social media: https://x.com/zkspin
Positioning: Game chain
CSX's one-sentence introduction: Building a highly parallel blockchain to run demanding DApps on-chain.
Whether financing has been obtained: No
According to zkSpin core contributor justinzhang.eth, the project will focus on gaming scenarios with high performance requirements. zkSpin allows each application session to have its own temporary zkRollup. This zkRollup runs on the player's own device, so it can achieve the best performance and does not consume any gas fees during the game because it does not occupy any public block space. Under the guarantee of zk proof, this type of blockchain is also secure.
