alliancedao.notion.site Open in urlscan Pro
2606:4700:4400::6812:21e8  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

Crypto/Web3 Startup Ideas (2023 Edition)

Suchen
Duplizieren


Notion testen

Crypto/Web3 Startup Ideas (2023 Edition)

Created By
Q
Qiao Wang


3 weitere Eigenschaften



Below are some crypto/Web3 startup ideas and themes we at AllianceDAO are
excited about. They are updated regularly to reflect our latest thinking.
This document serves two purposes:
To encourage you to apply to join our community and to get funded, if you are
working on one of these ideas.
To inspire you, if you are not sure what to build.
By no means you should feel that building something on this list is a
requirement to be admitted to AllianceDAO. In the past we have backed many ideas
that caught us by surprise.
Table of Content
Table of Content
Decentralized Infrastructure
Decentralizing All Layers of the Stack
Decentralized Postgres
Application-specific L2 as a Service
Oracles for Static Web2 Information
Semi-Custodial Wallet
Uncensorable Github
Developer Experience
Web3 Vercel/Firebase
Cosmos/Solana Developer Tooling
Smart Contract Copilot
Gaming
Fully Onchain Games
Game Engines
Consumer Apps
Web3 Twitter That Does Not Want to Be Web3 Twitter
Web3 Whatsapp
Habit Formation Apps
Fan Engagement
NFTs as Digitally Native Intellectual Properties
Proof of Physical Work
Health Data Sharing
AI Dataset Creation
Regenerative Finance (ReFi)
Decentralized Energy Grid
Talent Marketplaces as Cryptonetworks
Decentralized VoIP international calling
Oracle infrastructure for PoPW Networks
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
ZKP High-level Development Frameworks
Zk-bridges
Zk-rollup SDKs
ZKP Hardware Accelerators
Decentralized Intelligence Organizations
Zk On-chain Game Engines
Zk DeFi
Personal Data Marketplace
App-Chains (As a rollup or Cosmos Zone)
High performance DeFi protocols
App-chain gaming engines
Application-specific L2 as a Service
Enabling Cross-chain Security Sharing
DeSci
Scientific Funding
Decentralized 23andMe
Marketplace for Tokenized Carbon Offset
DeFi
Market-Driven Lending Protocols
Bridge Aggregator
Prediction Markets
Delta One Derivative and Options DEX
Decentralized Stablecoins
Lending Collateralized by Onchain Revenue
Privacy DeFi
Auction Markets
Bitcoin DeFi Protocols
Institutional-Grade Platform to Access DeFi
Marketplace for Block Validation Rights
Crypto B2B
Onchain Data
Payment over Crypto Rails
Productivity Tools
Onboarding Web2 Companies and Traditional Brands
AI and Web3 Crossover
Token-Incentivized Data Creation
AI Players in On-Chain Games
Smart Contract Copilot
Smart Contract Auditing/Monitor
Web3 Squarespace
AI-Assisted Front Page of Crypto
Proof of Humanity
Decentralized AI
AI-Embracing Social Networks and Games
Verticalization of Category-Defining Consumer Products
DAOs as Risk-Pooling Vehicles
NFT Communities as Digital Nations
Decentralized Infrastructure
Decentralizing All Layers of the Stack
In recent years, this space seems to have lost interest in genuine
decentralization, the very quality that made this space interesting in the first
place. Memes like “users don’t care about decentralization” are flying around.
But decentralization does not matter until it does. With the recent collapse of
centralized crypto institutions, as well as broader financial and social
censorship across the world, decentralization matters more than ever.
An application is only as decentralized as its most centralized layer. So for
applications that require decentralization, the entire stack needs to be
decentralized.
Layers of the stack include
DNS (eg, Handshake)
General compute
Data storage (eg, Filecoin)
Data indexing (eg, Graph)
Oracle (eg, Chainlink)
Cross-chain bridge
Node infrastructure
Fiat on-ramp and off-ramp
Wallet
ISP (eg, Helium)
CDN
Version control
It may appear that many of these layers already have a dominant decentralized
player. However, most existing players are at best proofs of concept. And even
if there’s already a production-ready player, it’s possible to identify
meaningful tradeoff vectors and build a legit competitor. Solana was an example
of this.
Make no mistake, however: these are some of the most challenging engineering and
computer science problems in Web3.
Decentralized Postgres
Currently there's no way to easily write a nice client-side Web3 app with
similar ease that you would in Web2. In Web2, you spin up a database on an AWS
instance, and you have your client-side app call this database to read and
write. There is no equivalent in Web3.
You can't just write the data into L1 blockchains, which would be too expensive
for most use cases. Storage protocols like Filecoin are primarily designed to
archive data, but provide no enterprise-grade performance guarantee (eg. low
latency) and familiar interface (eg. SQL) for reading the data.
Application-specific L2 as a Service
Projects like Axie, Bored Apes, and dYdX have launched or are considering
launching their own app-chain. By doing so they sacrifice shared security,
atomic composability, and fast prototyping for customizability, sovereignty,
value accrual, and gas predictability. An alternative to app-chains is an
app-specific L2s.
The app-L2 as a service product would make it stupid simple for dapp developers
to launch their own L2. It would recruit sequencers/verifiers behind the scenes,
and spin up app-specific indexers, oracles, bridges, block explorers, etc.
Oracles for Static Web2 Information
Currently, oracles in Web3 are mainly used for pulling high-frequency
information such as prices from centralized exchanges. This enables applications
like lending and derivatives.
What is also needed is oracles for relatively static information from:
Web2 social platforms
Gaming platforms like Steam
KYC providers
Credit bureaus
Banks
Semi-Custodial Wallet
Wallet Infrastructure still remains the largest bottleneck for mass adoption.
By design, centralized custodial wallets sacrifice flexibility for convenience.
It’s impossible to use something like a custodial Coinbase Wallet beyond trading
and transfer. Decentralized self-custodial wallets are needed for unrestricted
access to dapps.
The wallet we would like to see is “semi-custodial”:
User keeps a shard of the key and company keeps a different piece of the key.
Both are needed to sign transactions via multi-party computation (MPC). If only
one party is compromised, funds are still safe as no one has the full key at any
time.
If the user loses their key, the MPC also allows for key recovery with a third
shard of the key stored on an independent key management system (eg, AWS KSM).
Ideally, the wallet provides a WeChat-like super-app experience, inside which a
variety of apps can be directly accessed.
Finally, the wallet should have some or all the following properties:
Native on/off-ramps
Easy for dapp developers to integrate with
Multichain support
Batch transactions (sign once to to perform multiple onchain transactions)
Warns the user before signing a transaction that looks suspicious
As with many verticals where there are established leaders (eg, Metamask), to
build a successful wallet it’s paramount to identify a beachhead market that is
currently underserved by existing players.
Uncensorable Github
On August 8th, 2022, the Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash. Immediately, Github
censored Tornado Cash’s repo.
Developer Experience
Web3 Vercel/Firebase
Makes launching a static front end, deploying to IFPS, and setting an ENS domain
for resolution have similar DX to deploying a Web2 site to Vercel.
Cosmos/Solana Developer Tooling
Brings the DX closer to EVM DX. Think HardHat/Foundry for Cosmos/Solana.
Smart Contract Copilot
LLM could be utilized as a companion for dapp developers, offering real-time
autocomplete suggestions or generating boilerplate code. It could also assist
dapp developers in understanding existing code more easily by providing a
human-readable summary of its functionality.
Gaming
Fully Onchain Games
On-chain games are those where the entirety of the game state and game logic
(not just in-game assets likes currencies and NFTs.) is written to the
blockchain.
Consider Tic-Tac-Toe. The concept of turns, a 3x3 board, players and a sequence
of three must be unchangeably documented as the rules. The history of player
moves must also be recorded.
On the other hand, the colors of the board and pieces, the shapes of the pieces
(X and O can become Y and Z for all we care), the animations, the sounds, etc.
can all stay on the client-side.
Putting all states and logic onchain unlocks all sorts of novel behaviors:
Smart contract-based players (as opposed to human players) that play the game
according to intelligent and constantly improving rules. Think composability
between the game and players. One of the earliest instantiations of this is
actually MEV in DeFi. The MEV bots are the smart contract-based players, and MEV
is the game. Notice that in this case the smart contract-based players not only
compete with each other, but also compete with human players.
Trustless collaboration between players via smart contracts. Think composability
between players. Take Dark Forest as an example. At launch, it was a multiplayer
game with only informal alliances. In order to work together, you needed to
trust the other players will not betray you. However, someone built a smart
contract to act as a competing player. This contract allowed players to
permissionlessly donate it points and eventually rank high enough to win a
prize. It kept track and then when it won, those players were able to share that
prize pro-rata.
Game mods built by third-party developers without fear of getting deplatformed.
Think composability between games. Using Dark Forest again as an example.
Someone created a single-player spin-off of the multiplayer game. The same logic
from the main contract was used, thanks to Ethereum’s rarely used Diamond
Standard. All that was changed was the map, the UX and scoring. Instead of
players trying to dominate each other synchronously on the same terrain, each
was instead trying to solve the same puzzle, but faster than the rest.
Game Engines
While most game engines currently building in the space are looking to add web3
features to a largely Web2 game, we are actually excited about tools for
creating fully onchain games. What if we could create standards of interaction
or physics for games on chain? Imagine even the laws of Dungeons and Dragons
on-chain, available for anyone to reuse and remix.
If history is any indication, it’s highly likely that the first successful
onchain game engine comes from a successful onchain game studio. Think Unreal
(the engine) and Epic Games (the studio).
As a side note, by the same token, the first successful Web3 game publisher will
also likely come from a successful Web3 game studio. Think Steam (the publisher)
and Valve (the studio).
Potentially key features of the game engine are wallet integrations and in-game
NFT marketplaces.
Consumer Apps
Web3 Twitter That Does Not Want to Be Web3 Twitter
The winning Web3 Twitter will ultimately offer the features we have been eager
to see: data truly owned by users themselves, uncontrolled by one entity or even
one man, multiple clients permissionlessly built, multiple options of curation
algorithms that users can choose from.
There’s only one problem. If history is any indication, it’s highly unlikely
that the first successful Web3 Twitter will start out as something that wants to
be the next Twitter or looks similar to Twitter. Perhaps the Web3 Twitter will
start out as a game, a DeFi super-app, or something so novel and seemingly so
inconsequential that it gets laughed at.
Web3 Whatsapp
A messaging app that is
Privacy-preserving: strong end-to-end encryption, credibly so thanks to being
open source
User-owned: encrypted data on IPFS or the likes, controlled only by the user’s
own key
Uncensorable: user cannot be banned by someone like Meta or the government
Portable: ability to build multiple independent clients
Native commerce: supports native crypto payment
The Web3 Whatsapp should be progressively decentralized. The first step could be
to use decentralized storage while centralizing compute. In the future, migrate
to decentralized compute when it’s production-ready.
Intuitively “messaging” is less complex to build and to go to the market than
“social”.
Go after crypto-natives users first, as they appreciate the aforementioned five
qualities and are easier to onboard.
Habit Formation Apps
StepN has shown that token incentives can be effective in encouraging people to
develop healthy habits. This could include activities like running, sleeping,
meditating, eating well, or learning something new. Some research has suggested
that it can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit,
with the average being around 66 days. Getting over this initial hump can be
difficult for many people, but the use of financial incentives through tokens
may provide the motivation that people need to stick with their new habits and
make them a permanent part of their lives.
One significant challenge is is the need to design an effective oracle system,
as the habit formation app must be able to link an offchain action to an onchain
event.
Fan Engagement
NFTs have created a new way for creators of all types to monetize their personal
brand. We are interested in startups building fan engagement platforms across a
range of industries (musicians, athletes, writers, video creators, etc.) and
geographic regions. We are also interested backing in the individual brands
themselves.
A key challenge is for these startups to create utility for those NFTs. At the
basic level, those NFTs are collectibles and/or digital identity. But ideally
they should be more than just that — perhaps exclusive access to the creator,
treasury governance rights, or royalty from derivative works (vs. trading). If
an NFT collection is merely a collectible or a PFP, then it’s really just a
nonfungible form of the ICOs of 2017.
NFTs as Digitally Native Intellectual Properties
Consider intellectual properties as an asset class. To get a sense of how
important this asset class is, over the past 5 decades, intangible assets have
increased from ~1/5 to ~4/5 of S&P500 market value.
NFTs representing individual IPs could help unlock liquidity across a variety of
assets such as:
Music, video, writing, and art
Proprietary technologies and scientific discoveries
Brands
The idea then is build a primary and secondary marketplace focusing on a
particular type of assets.
Today, several such NFT marketplaces exist, but the true potential of NFTs lies
not in their speculative nature, but in their ability to create derivative
works. This would make them productive assets, rather than just trading items.
One way to achieve this is to use the traditional legal system to attach
intellectual property rights to specific NFTs, effectively tokenizing IPs.
Eventually, however, NFTs could become digitally native IPs that do not rely on
the legal system, with value naturally accruing to the original works through
social consensus. We have seen with many popular PFP projects that
“right-click-save” does not only not destroy the value of the original work, but
actually serve as free marketing for it. This is because the image can be shared
and disseminated widely, increasing exposure and potentially driving interest in
the original work.
Proof of Physical Work
Tokens may be more effective than the most competent centralized entities such
as government and big corporations at coordinating large-scale human activities.
See our research here.
Health Data Sharing
One of the major challenges facing researchers in public health is the lack of
adequate datasets to test their hypotheses. One possible solution to this
problem is the decentralized contribution of health data by individuals for use
in research and drug development.
For example, individuals could share their DNA data and relevant health
information, creating a decentralized version of 23andMe where participants are
rewarded for their contributions. Universities, hospitals, and pharmaceutical
companies could access this data through a marketplace for research and
commercial applications.
Another example is the sharing of physical activity data, heart rate, sleep
data, and other types of data collected by wearable devices. These data could be
used by wellness-focused businesses to improve their products. In these
applications, user contributions are simple and standardized, making them
well-suited for PoPW networks. Furthermore, the use of privacy-enhancing
technologies like zero-knowledge proofs could benefit health data use cases.
AI Dataset Creation
Creating large and complex datasets for training advanced AI models, such as
those used in computer vision, requires a significant amount of human input. For
example, to create a dataset for training an autonomous driving model, photos of
traffic conditions must be captured and then labeled correctly to train the
computer vision model. Both steps require significant human involvement. A PoPW
network can be used to aggregate human contributions to create datasets for AI
and other uses. These datasets could be used by companies that develop and train
large AI models. As the complexity of these models increases, PoPW networks can
continually update and expand the datasets to improve their performance.
Regenerative Finance (ReFi)
PoPW networks can help promote sustainable activities. In such a network
participants who engage in sustainable activities are rewarded with tokens,
which are then purchased and burned by institutions seeking to achieve a greener
footprint and a greater sustainability impact. The system works similarly to
carbon credits in that the demand for such assets ultimately comes from social
signaling. Examples of applications include cleaning waterways, recycling,
financing better industrial filtration systems, etc.
Decentralized Energy Grid
The rapid growth of renewable energy is a positive development for the
environment, but it can also be unpredictable due to the intermittent nature of
sources like wind and solar. Batteries can help solve this problem by storing
excess energy for use when it is needed. The more batteries that are connected
to a public energy network, the more useful they become. The PoPW network uses
tokens incentives to encourage households to deploy their batteries and to pool
them together to for later use.
Talent Marketplaces as Cryptonetworks
Web2 talent marketplaces — of all sorts, but especially hourly and contract
workers — suffer from the following problems:
The tendency for marketplaces to increase their fees as their bargaining power
grows against users
The lack of ability for users to transfer their reputation across different
marketplaces
The limitations of using fiat payment systems for international transactions
The requirement for personally identifiable information (PII) in onboarding
processes that prevents many users around the world from participating.
Crypto may be able to help solve all of the above.
Decentralized VoIP international calling
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology has already significantly reduced
the cost of international calls by routing them over the internet.
Decentralization can further reduce the cost of these calls by up to another
order of magnitude. A PoPW network of users who connect local phone lines to the
internet can create a global phone network that allows users to make
international calls at the cost of a local call. This decentralized network can
offer a more cost-effective alternative to traditional international calling
services.
Oracle infrastructure for PoPW Networks
In PoPW networks, the off-chain contributions of network participants must be
proven on-chain in order to be rewarded with the network's native token. This is
known as the "oracle problem," and it is one of the biggest challenges facing
PoPW networks. Malicious actors may attempt to manipulate the oracle in order to
extract maximum value from the network. An example of this problem can be seen
in the malicious behavior of some participants in the Helium network. Because
the network rewards participants based on the geographical coverage of its
hotspots, there are incentives to fake the existence or location of hotspots.
Despite efforts to combat these behaviors, such as using deny lists and a
hotspot challenging system, proving the existence and location of Helium
hotspots remains a challenge.
Other PoPW platforms, such as Hivemapper, attempt to prevent oracle manipulation
by using hardware authentication. Hivemapper dashcams use GPS location and
connections to Helium hotspots as part of their proof of location protocol, and
they also employ a human-operated quality assurance layer to verify the
authenticity of submitted imagery. While this approach can be effective, it also
adds complexity and opens the door to potential coordination between
contributors and reviewers.
Efficient PoPW oracles are still an open question, and there is currently no
general solution to the oracle problem. Hardware authentication can provide some
protection for specific use cases, as hardware is generally more difficult to
manipulate. For example, spoof-resistant GPS modules could be used for
location-sensitive PoPW contributions. However, more resilient and generic
oracles are needed to support a wider range of use cases.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
For more details, see our research here.
ZKP High-level Development Frameworks
Similar to Tensorflow and PyTorch in AI, high-level ZKP development frameworks
are critical to unlocking innovation at the application level. These frameworks
need to
Abstract the complexity of the underlying ZKP backends
Support a variety of ZKP backends and hardware environments, e.g., CPUs and
GPUs.
Allow efficient debugging and testing
Offer a rich development environment with examples and tutorials
The closest examples in the Ethereum ecosystem are Hardhat and Foundry but they
are not likely to support zkEVMs or ZKPs soon. Instead, existing abstraction
efforts such as Cairo may eventually evolve to fill this space.
Zk-bridges
Existing bridges rely on strong trust assumptions and are relatively expensive.
zk-bridges could not only provide strong trustlessness guarantees, but also
significantly reduces on-chain verification cost. This is similar to how
zk-rollups are validated on the underlying L1. However, the level of complexity
for for cross-chain messaging is higher because the signature schemes and the
cryptographic functions to be validated can be different between source and
destination chains. See technical details here.
Zk-rollup SDKs
Zk-rollups are growing in popularity and can enable application-specific L2s for
games or high-throughput DeFi protocols. In this scenario, the zk-rollup mainly
performs the execution and settlement while the consensus and data availability
will be handled by the L1. However, launching an app-specific zk-rollup is still
very complex. We believe that startups that offer developer-friendly SDKs to
launch custom zk-rollup will solve a real business need and can become valuable
businesses by offering the developing toolbox, developer services, sequencer
services and supporting infrastructure.
ZKP Hardware Accelerators
Specialized hardware companies that target specific use cases and build an early
market lead turn out to be massively valuable companies. This was true for AI
when Nvidia became the most-valued North American semiconductor company by
specializing in AI hardware. This was also true in the Bitcoin mining space when
Bitmain, Canaan, and Whatsminer became unicorns by specializing in ASIC miners.
Companies that design and build efficient ZKP hardware accelerators will follow
the same trajectory.
Decentralized Intelligence Organizations
ZKPs can give birth to decentralized intelligence organizations. In these,
intelligence operators, data sleuths, and spies can be part of a network without
interacting or knowing each other. Participants can use ZKPs to prove knowledge
of certain intelligence data before receiving private payment in exchange for
that data. Such systems can also facilitate collaborative and composable ways to
enrich or interpret collected data while maintaining the privacy of
participants.
Zk On-chain Game Engines
Information incompleteness is a critical ingredient of some of the best games
mankind has created, such as Poker and Starfcraft. (Just to illustrate, examples
of information-complete games include Chess and Go.) Dark Forest demonstrated
that ZKPs can enable information-incomplete on-chain games. This is critical for
the design of more interactive games where the players’ actions are kept private
until they decide to reveal them. As on-chain games mature, we expect ZKPs to be
part of the game execution engine. The opportunity is massive for startups that
succeed to integrate privacy features in a high-throughput on-chain game engine.
Zk DeFi
See Privacy DeFi and Auction Markets.
Personal Data Marketplace
Much of our personal data can drive positive societal changes if they are shared
with the right entities. For example, personal health data can be crowd-sourced
to help researchers develop new drugs. Consumer behavior data can be shared with
brands to developer better products. However, privacy has been a long-standing
concern of many. ZKPs can enable the private sharing and monetization of such
data.
App-Chains (As a rollup or Cosmos Zone)
For more details, see our research here.
High performance DeFi protocols
DeFi protocols that aim to compete with Web 2 performance need to be implemented
as app-chains. Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) exchanges are the top candidates
for this. dYdX started this trend and we expect to see spot and derivative
exchanges to be built as app-chains to benefit from low fees and low latency.
The key enabler here to work with a custo]mizable technology stack that can
adjusted to the DeFi protocol needs.
App-chain gaming engines
One of the gaps that limit the adoption of app-chains for
performance-constrained applications, such as gaming is the limited
implementation options. StarkEx is a popular option in this regard. We hope to
see startups that build new efficient architectures that can support 100K+ in
TPS for onchain games.
Games will likely require less composability than DeFi, which makes the
app-chain path particularly viable.
Application-specific L2 as a Service
See Application-specific L2 as a Service.
Enabling Cross-chain Security Sharing
The security challenges of app-chains can be mitigated using products that
enable cross-chain security. Similar to merged mining for PoW chains, we
envision approaches that allow shared security between different PoS chains,
e.g, validators staking ETH instead of the native app-chain token to secure the
app-chain. Liquid staking protocols may probably play an important role in this
regime.
DeSci
Scientific Funding
One of the biggest problems plaguing scientific communities is the lack of
funding. And the lack of funding stems from the risky and speculative nature of
scientific discoveries. The idea is to channel the crypto degen energy into
funding scientific experiments. Perhaps DAOs as a Risk-Pooling Vehicles is the
solution.
Decentralized 23andMe
The other obstacle to scientific progress is the lack of data. For example,
humans have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of interdependent genes.
In order to be able to derive deep insights from genetic data, there potentially
needs to be even more data points (or else the dataset is too sparse). The idea
then is to create a crowdsourced, massive genetic dataset, using token
incentives.
In addition, a major concern with centralized companies like 23andMe is privacy.
Potentially ZKP can play a role here.
More generally, we’d like to see startups that leverage token incentives to
bootstrap valuable datasets for scientific research that wasn’t previously
possible.
Marketplace for Tokenized Carbon Offset
Tokenization of real-world assets has historically seen little success, despite
the promise of blockchains offering greater transparency and liquidity. One
possible reason is that for the vast majority of real-world assets there is
already a legacy marketplace that, despite being clunky, is “good enough” and
deeply entrenched. For example, what’s the point of tokenizing real estate as
NFTs if existing MLS works reasonably well?
Carbon offsets could be an exception to this, simply because it’s a relatively
new asset class. There is not a legacy system that is so entrenched that it’s
undisruptable. Building web3 infrastructure to bring carbon offsets on-chain
could very well be the first real success story of tokenization of real-world
assets.
DeFi
Market-Driven Lending Protocols
Price discovery in most incumbent lending protocols today are not entirely
driven by the market, but instead by decentralized governance or a mathematical
formula with few degrees of freedom.
Bridge Aggregator
Think 1inch for bridges. Built to be composable so that wallets can use your
bridge aggregator instead of manually supporting each bridge.
Prediction Markets
Notably sports betting. Web2 betting platforms are plagued by the following same
issues:
Users don’t truly own their assets
Users get censored by the platform
The platform cheats at the expense of users
Delta One Derivative and Options DEX
This category is more compelling than ever following the collapse of FTX.
Trading volume on decentralized derivative protocols are currently merely a
fraction of their centralized counterparts.
Decentralized Stablecoins
Another post-FTX awakening is that everyone is worried about counterparty risks,
and justifiably so. Self-custodied BTC and ETH do not have counterparty risks,
but they aren’t stable stores of value. Centralized stablecoins are stable
stores of value but they expose the user to a bunch of opaque counterparty
risks. A decentralized stablecoin is more sought after than ever.
Lending Collateralized by Onchain Revenue
We envision a future where more and more onchain entities (individuals,
corporations, or DAOs) receive regular revenues onchain. The idea is to build a
lending platform for these entities to borrow money against their incoming
cashflow.
Privacy DeFi
A DeFi platform that allows users to transact in a way where some or all of the
following information is kept private:
Sender and recipient address
Asset transacted
Amount transacted
Ideally, platform-wide systemic risk metrics such as leverage remains still
public.
Auction Markets
A specific example of privacy DeFi is auction markets. In an auction market
participants can submit bids at any time but the settlement occurs for everyone
at the same time. This means that if the price of bids is public they can get
front-run. Currently most auction markets run their bidding process off-chain in
order to prevent front-running, but potentially privacy-preserving technologies
like ZKPs can be used to enable fully on-chain privacy-preserving auction
markets.
Bitcoin DeFi Protocols
A product that helps make Bitcoin, the most liquid cryptoasset, more useful than
just being a store of value. Be it yield generation, trading, payment, etc. Even
if the solution must be semi-centralized.
Institutional-Grade Platform to Access DeFi
A platform for institutions to access various DeFi protocols for trading,
borrowing, etc.
Marketplace for Block Validation Rights
Cross chain MEV requires strong guarantees of concurrent execution of
transactions on multiple chains. One way to guarantee this concurrent execution
is to allow MEV searchers/block builders to buy block inclusion rights on
different chains beforehand. This requires a marketplace where block validators
on different chains offer the inclusion rights in advance. MEV searchers who are
interested in capturing specific MEV opportunities will purchase the inclusion
rights in all the relevant chains. This way the searcher can guarantee the
atomicity of execution of their cross-chain bundle on all the relevant chains.
Crypto B2B
Onchain Data
The onchain data space is still a largely unsolved problem space. The key is to
identify a narrow enough beachhead market that is experiencing real pain points.
Dimensions of the beachhead market to consider include:
Which target user segment (eg, analysts, product/growth, engineers)?
Which dataset (eg, NFT data)?
Centralized vs. decentralized?
Historical vs. live data?
Which chain?
API vs. no-code?
Reading vs. writing?
Payment over Crypto Rails
Interest in using crypto as a payment rail is slowly growing among crypto-savvy
users. These users include crypto businesses that prefer to pay each other in
crypto, employees of these businesses who prefer to get paid in crypto,
consumers in emerging economies who appreciate crypto as an inflation hedge and
an uncensorable store of wealth, and contract workers who can’t participate in
the global economy due to the ability to provide PII or to receive international
payment.
But today people can already pay each other in USDC or other stablecoins if they
wanted to. Where’s the startup opportunity and what pain points need to be
solved?
Accounting and taxes related to these payments
Setting up triggers for these payments, such as time or certain actions
Permissioning
There are several reasons why one might choose to use crypto as a payment rail:
fees, speed, pseudonymity, settlement guarantee, and programability.
Productivity Tools
Any individual or organization who uses mainstream tools like Notion or Github
knows that it is an existential risk for them. So much mission-critical
information and workflow are ultimately controlled by one company, and therefore
prone to censorship or privacy-infringement by the company itself or by the
government.
The first go-to-market would be crypto startup as they happen to be a
concentrated group of people who care about censorship and privacy, but of
course eventually the product could be useful for non-Web3 organizations.
Onboarding Web2 Companies and Traditional Brands
Every well-known, non-Web3 organization — From Starducks to Disney — is looking
for a Web3 strategy. Their level of “Web3-nativeness” varies tremendously. The
idea is to build for those that have a good idea of what to do with Web3 (e.g.,
NFTs minting, token-gate access, loyalty programs) but don’t have the technical
know-how to execute the vision.
AI and Web3 Crossover
Token-Incentivized Data Creation
See AI Dataset Creation and Health Data Sharing.
AI Players in On-Chain Games
See Fully On-Chain Games.
Smart Contract Copilot
See Smart Contract Copilot.
Smart Contract Auditing/Monitor
We don’t expect LLM-based or similar smart contract auditing tools to fully
replace human auditors. They can, however, help catch common bugs faster and
more accurately than human auditors, allowing the latter to focus on
sophisticated and rare bugs. This could lead to significant cost savings for
developers.
Similarly, smart contracts deployed to product can be monitored in real-time to
help dapp developers monitor anomalies or to help consumers avoid getting
scammed.
Web3 Squarespace
Another potential use case for LLM in crypto is the automatic generation of
customized smart contracts that are tailored to the specific needs of a user or
organization. This could involve using LLM to generate the contract code based
on a set of inputs provided by the user, such as the terms of the agreement and
the parties involved.
Instead of requiring users to have extensive knowledge of smart contract
programming languages and the blockchain, LLM could help make smart contracts
more accessible to a wider range of users and organizations. This is similar to
how no-code website builders like Squarespace make it possible for non-technical
users to launch their own websites without the need for programming knowledge.
AI-Assisted Front Page of Crypto
The idea is to use LLM to translate human-readable commands into code that
interacts with onchain data or smart contracts in production. For an
illustrative example, the user may type in “convert my non-stable assets in this
wallets into stablecoins and deposit them evenly into the 5 safest
yield-generating pools you can find”.
Additionally, LLM could be used in the opposite direction, by reading a set of
smart contracts in production and generating a summary of its functionality. Or,
reading the onchain activities of a given wallet address and identify the holder
as an “NFT whale”, “DeFi degen”, “highly creditworthy”, etc. Or, reading
unparsed on-chain transactions and produce a human-readable translation.
Current front-page-of-crypto products are highly technical. The core idea is to
abstract as much complexity away from nontechnical users by translating natural
language into machine language or vice versa.
Proof of Humanity
In a world where AI becomes increasingly prevalent, proof of humanity becomes
increasingly necessary. Ie, how can a human creator prove that a piece of
content is written by them and not by a bot?
The idea then is to build a product that allows human creators to
cryptographically sign every piece of content they create using an Ethereum key
pair that they control. The natural question then is how can they prove that the
signature is controlled by them specifically and not someone else? Potentially
they can tweet their signature from their real-name Twitter account. In other
words, such a proof of humanity product could use existing social networks to
bootstrap its credibility.
Decentralized AI
In a perfect world, AI models would be able to run and potentially even be
trained on local devices, rather than relying on cloud computing. The motivation
is exactly the same as why we want decentralized money, finance, and social
media, as it would provide a degree of censorship resistance against the
companies that create these models.
Taking this idea even further, it is possible to imagine a marketplace where
those who need access to computing power for their AI models can connect with
those who have idle computing power to offer. This market approach, as opposed
to centralized approach, could potentially reduce the cost of running and
training AI models and to provide an even greater degree of censorship
resistance.
Needless to say this is more of an AI project than a crypto project, as it would
require significant research into methods for compressing and partitioning AI
models.
AI-Embracing Social Networks and Games
The key insight is that while crypto offers a user experience that may be worse
for many people compared to Web2, there is one group of users for whom crypto
can offer a significantly better UX: bots.
In crypto-enabled finance (DeFi), automated traders experience a better UX as
they don’t need to worry about insolvency and withdrawal issues.
In fully on-chain games, AI players can benefit from a better UX because they
don’t need to worry about getting de-platformed.
In decentralized social media, AI participants that have the opportunity to
contribute meaningfully to conversations without worrying about upsetting the
moderators.
Most importantly, AI, unlike humans, does not experience the same level of pain
when it comes to having to sign every transaction on every action, to wait
seconds for transactions to settle, to re-sign transactions if the previous one
fails, to replenish the wallet, and so on.
We believe that some of the first successful social and gaming applications will
in fact be those that embrace AI instead of resisting it.
Verticalization of Category-Defining Consumer Products
This past cycle we saw the rise of several category-defining products. These
categories include:
NFT marketplaces
Wallets
DeFi aggregator/dashboard
Data analytics
Each of these category-defining products can be verticalized across
Geographic regions
User segments (eg, amateurs vs. pro)
Verticals (eg, game, art, music, etc.)
Blockchains
Device (eg, desktop vs. mobile)
Take NFT marketplaces for example. There could be an Opensea for each of:
East Asia, Latin America, US/Western Europe, and so on
Amateur traders, pro traders, and so on
In-game items, art, land, music, and so on
Ethereum, Solana, and so on
Desktop and mobile
Will leave it to the reader to do the same exercise for Metamask, Zapper, and
Dune.
Fundamentally, consumers across these various segments have different needs and
preferences. As such, it’s simply not possible for the incumbent to serve all of
them.
One of the best ways to build a successful company is to analyze the incumbent’s
user bases, identity user segments that are under-served, and build specifically
for them.
DAOs as Risk-Pooling Vehicles
There are certain professions with high risk high reward:
Pro gamers
White hat hackers
Youtube/TikTok creators
Musicians
Story writers
Drug developers
A DAO of gamers/hackers/creators/musicians/etc could be a perfect vehicle for
these professionals to share risks while maintaining the same expected reward.
It’s no coincidence that the first generation of DAOs are investment DAOs.
Entrepreneurship and investments are high risk high reward activities.
These DAOs would serve three primary functions:
Curation: they scout for and admit high potential members.
Risk sharing: they invest in new members in exchange for future financial
upside. Members optionally share each other’s upside.
Support: they provide support to each other, such as marketing and distribution.
Why DAOs vs. traditional legal entities?
Fundamentally, DAOs could reduce frictions associated with the traditional legal
framework. DAOs could be a better alternative than traditional legal entities if
Members change frequently: imagine the amount of paperwork involved!
Members are global: multiple jurisdictions mean leading with more legal and
banking complexities.
Members want to stay pseudonymous: KYC/AML are required to set up traditional
legal entities.
NFT Communities as Digital Nations
One of the key end games for crypto is to deprecate nation states as humanity's
basic organizational unit.
Crypto enables us to implement property rights via encryption, constitution and
laws via smart contracts, taxation via token issuance, national currencies via
cryptocurrencies, transparent policymaking via decentralized governance, and
international trade via DeFi.
The idea then is to start as an online community, with an NFT collection that
represents their identity, a shared set of interests or beliefs, a path to grow
economically, and a vision to ultimately become a digital nation that enters the
physical realm.




Notion verwendet Cookies. Weitere Informationen findest du unter  Hinweis zu
Cookies .
Alle akzeptieren