An early-stage accelerator programme called Beacon with an emphasis on web3 recently launched its first batch. On Tuesday, at a demo day, the teams from the first cohort, referred to as Cohort 0, presented their concepts.
Even though it’s only the second week of 2023, startups are already starting demo days in an effort to maintain momentum in the rapidly shifting cryptocurrency sector.
Sandeep Nailwal, a key contributor to Beacon and co-founder of Polygon speaking to a media house, stated that “for Cohort 0, we spoke with over 1,000 projects to end up at 15 companies in Cohort 0 with 13 graduating at our Demo Day.”
For its autumn and spring cohorts, the three-month programme accepts roughly 15 to 20 applicants each time it is offered twice a year.
“We feel like Cohort 0 is our MVP of Beacon,” Nailwal said. “So for this cohort, we hand-picked our favorite teams through taking calls with founders sourced through our networks.”
The elite list of the mentors that joined to chat with our founders is included below; to see the whole list of all mentors engaged, visit 0xbeacon.com/mentors.
- Jack Lu (CEO, Co-Founder Magic Eden)
- VC Panel: Anand Iyer (Venture Partner Lightspeed), Maria Shen (Partner Electric Capital), Ryan Kim (Founding Partner Hashed), Geoff Hamilton (Investment Partner at Variant Fund)
- Rob Behnke (Co-Founder Halborn)
- Brendan Farmer (Co-Lead Polygon Zero)
- Dan Kim (VP of Business Development and Listing Coinbase)
- Miles Anthony (CEO, Co-Founder Decentral Games)
The standard investment for the next cohort will be $250,000, and each firm accepted into the programme will get an $8 million post-money valuation from Beacon, according to Nailwal. Investments in Cohort 0 were made on a case-by-case basis since the team was still perfecting its approach, he noted.
Beacon is “chain-agnostic,” therefore the majority of the Cohort 0 teams were developing cross-chain apps, according to Nailwal. But when it comes to the number of teams developing on that blockchain, Ethereum came out on top. Kenzi Wang, a key contributor at Beacon and co-founder of Symbolic Capital, said at the demo day that there were 29 founders of the 13 firms, spread across nine countries and 13 cities.
The firms concentrated on a number of cryptocurrency-related subsectors, including developer tools, infrastructure, gaming, and decentralized lending and borrowing. With the exception of Community Gaming, which is in the Series A stage, almost all of the firms in the cohort are at the seed stage.
Here are the details behind Cohort 0’s 13 startups:
Organization: Arcana
- Core: Web3 developer toolkit
- Founders: Aravindh Kumar and Mayur Relekar
- Level: Seed
- Profile: With capabilities like user authentication, storage, and access control, Arcana lets developers complement their tech stack so they can create nearly any project. Due to its design and architecture, developers may simply utilize the expanding Arcana stack of tools and services to provide their consumers with benefits that have never been seen before.
Organization: Blinkmoon
- Core: Game development studio
- Founders: Hajeir Mazinani and Hugh Behroozy
- Level: Seed
- Profile: Blinkmoon, a Canadian company with its headquarters in Vancouver, aims to revolutionize the gaming sector by combining cutting-edge technology from the VFX and gaming industries into a single studio. The breathtaking graphics on popular movies like Game of Thrones and Guardians of the Galaxy, as well as classic video games like NBA 2K, League of Legends: Wild Rift, and the Dead Rising series, are the work of a team of artists behind Blinkmoon.
- Core: Web3 event experience
- Founders: Chase Guo
- Level: Seed
- Profile: The web3 event experience firm assists businesses in turning events into one-of-a-kind experiences. Companies may simply develop customizable virtual worlds or interesting real events to captivate people using in-world DAO governance and GameFi.
Organization: Colexion
- Core: GameFi ecosystem
- Founders: Abhay Aggarwal
- Level: Seed
- Profile: With an emphasis on servicing APAC, Colexion is a GameFi ecosystem integrating web2 games into web3. This is being accomplished by Colexion using a platform known as the Colexion Core, which offers games a variety of services essential for them to survive in the web3 environment (minting, marketplace, web2 to web3 bridge, comment wallet, etc.). In their web2 daily fantasy game and hyper casual game, Colexion has over 18 million members.
Organization: Community Gaming
- Core: Esports platform
- Founders: Chris Gonsalves
- Level: Series A
- Profile: A comprehensive esports tournament platform, Community Gaming strives to provide infrastructure to participants in the market. The platform offers tools for players, tournament organizers, and game creators to organize, host, and take part in esports competitions. It is supported by blockchain payment systems based on Ethereum and Solana. Additionally, it offers players a daily content engine for profits, and the option to monetize their gaming via quest completion, and game discovery.
Organization: Cubist
- Core: Web3 developer tools and infrastructure
- Founders: Ann Stefan, Deian Stefan, Riad Wahby, Fraser Brown
- Level: Seed
- Profile: The goal of Cubist, a supplier of infrastructure and developer tools, is to provide web3 developers access to modern software engineering methods and security. In order to make it simple for developers to create, test, and deploy dApps across multiple chains and cross-chains, this toolkit focuses on offering safer and more secure choices. A former COO of a financial company as well as professors of computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and UC San Diego make up its founding team. The members of the team have devoted their professional lives to retrofitting security for real-world systems, and they have jointly authored over 80 research papers on subjects including computer systems, programming languages, security, and cryptography.
- Core: MEV solutions for Ethereum-based blockchains and rollups
- Founders: Alex Watts, Jordan Hagan
- Level: Seed
- Profile: Without the need to install or maintain specialized software on validating nodes, the FastLane protocol aims to pay validators, boost algorithmic traders’ efficiency, and relieve network members of the strain caused by duplicate transactions. The protocol monetizes propagation bottlenecks in the layer-2 blockchain Polygon and distributes the benefits to participating validators in order to decrease transaction spam and enhance the general health of the Ethereum network.
Organization: Meta Apes
- Core: Web3 game
- Founders: Taylor Shim, Nicholas Carr
- Level: Seed
- Profile: Meta Apes is a mobile web3 game that is free to play and win-to-earn and is based on the BNB Application Sidechain (BAS). In order to win the “race to space,” players may construct their own towns and cities while competing with and discovering others. The game tries to merge web3 components like in-game money with classic gaming elements like massively multiplayer online (MMO) techniques. The crew has experience from Ubisoft, Gameloft, Zynga, AppLovin, and Epic, among other companies.
Organization: Mystic Moose
- Core: Web3 gaming developer
- Founders: Mike Levine
- Level: Seed
- Profile: A group of industry professionals from Activision, LucasArts, and Electronic Arts founded the web3 platform, game studio, and publisher, Mystic Moose. Their debut game, Planet Mojo, is a browser-based server of networked games that was built on top of its scalable backend platform Sumatra. Its auto-chess game, Mojo Melee, is now undergoing alpha playtesting and is scheduled to officially debut on browsers and mobile devices in the first quarter of this year. Animoca Brands, Republic Crypto, and Polygon Studios are a few of the sponsors of the studio.
Organization: Nillion
- Core: Web3 infrastructure
- Founders: Alex Page, Andrew Yeoh, Andrew Masanto
- Level: Seed
- Profile: Nillion is a web3 infrastructure firm that is concerned with protecting data storage, processing, and fragmentation on the internet. According to Andrew Yeoh, the company’s founding chief marketing officer, “Nillion is a deep technology infrastructure project.” “While blockchains decentralise finance, Nillion aims to decentralise everything else and the rest of data.” Along with former workers of Uber, Indiegogo, and Hedera Hashgraph, the founders also include Coinbase and Nike executives. According to Nillion CEO Alex Page, the business gathered more than $20 million in December 2022 from more than 150 investors in a “conscious move” to avoid consolidated ownership.
Organization: Davos Protocol
- Core: Stable asset lending protocol
- Founders: Varun Satyam, Julian Hayward, Filipe Gonçalves
- Level: Seed
- Profile: According to its website, Davos Protocol is home to its stable asset, DAVOS, which is sustained by its monetary policy, which, on a weekly basis, balances yield production and price stability by using liquid staking. It gives customers the option to take out DAVOS loans using liquid staking tokens as security. Additionally, users may provide stable asset pairings to yield farm, give liquidity, and earn incentives. Through its protocol, the team wants to encourage the use of blockchain technology among the general public. Among its strategic partners are Ankr and Polygon.
Organization: Timeswap
- Core: Decentralized lending and borrowing protocol
- Founders: Ameeth Devadas, Harshita Singh, Ricsson Ngo
- Level: Seed
- Profile: Timeswap is an automated market maker (AMM) protocol powered by Polygon and a decentralized lending and borrowing platform. One of its primary features allows users to construct any Ethereum-based ERC20 token pool by supplying the necessary liquidity. Other features include customizable interest rates and collateral considerations so users may pick their risk-return profile. According to a post from August 2020, the platform has completed over $4 million in lending, borrowing, and liquidity volume on its protocol without the use of token incentives.
Organization: Ylide
- Core: Decentralized protocol for wallet communication
- Founders: Ignat Shapkin, Kirill Zubkov, Danila Simonov
- Level: Seed
- Profile: Ylide is a decentralized protocol for wallet-to-wallet communication that supports end-to-end encryption, multichain messaging, and data storage in smart contracts. Additionally, it offers a built-in mail client and tools enabling developers to add communication capabilities to their applications “as easily as building a Lego set,” according to the team.
