Author: defioasis

Note: This article is for information sharing only, it does not endorse the mentioned projects, and has no financial interest in them.

Recently, Paradigm published a call for “heroes”, hoping to work with excellent teams and talents in the crypto to solve significant business and research problems. Paradigm was founded in 2018 and raised $2.5 billion in venture capital funds in November 2021. As a research-oriented technology investment company, Paradigm has delivered many outstanding projects to the industry, with its investments in Uniswap, Lido, Blur and others becoming pillars in their respective fields.

In its latest call for “heroes”, Paradigm indicated that its areas of exploration include: Intent-centric protocols and infra, Hooks on top of Uniswap v4 (especially ones that focus on LP profitability and loss-vs-rebalancing), Infra for a rollup-centric, multi-chain world, Shared sequencers, Onchain games, Crypto-native social apps, Prediction markets (creating markets with real liquidity), Stablecoin payments/fintech, Onchain treasuries, and ZKP apps.

This article will review the projects in Paradigm’s focus areas from multiple dimensions, such as project progress, financing, on-chain data, and social attention.

Intent-centric protocols and infra

In the past, developers designed and developed protocols that conformed to certain specifications or standards. These protocols would have explicit provisions in terms of functionality, performance, and security, but often overlooked the actual needs and intentions of the end users. Being intent-centric is about starting from the user’s perspective, guiding the design with the user’s goals or intentions, and creating protocols and infrastructure that offer a better user experience and meet the user’s needs.

Anoma

Anoma might be the first protocol in history explicitly designed with the concept of “intent” as its core architecture. With intent as its core, Anoma introduces new primitives that allow existing Web 2.5 dAPPs to achieve full decentralization, such as Optimism and ZK rollups, DEXs, NFT Marketplaces, or public goods platforms like Gitcoin. Furthermore, Anoma’s architecture is designed from the beginning for applications involving infinite users and an infinite number of intents, making new applications that might be tricky, constrained, or impossible to build on existing protocol architectures simple. These new applications include real-time Rollups, multi-party and multi-element exchanges, second-price sealed auctions, privacy-protected DAOs, and game B economic systems, such as plural currencies, collaborative finance, and heterotopias.

The Anoma Foundation completed its third round of financing led by CMCC Global in May of this year, with participants including Delphi Digital and Electric Capital. The Anoma Foundation completed two rounds of financing in 2020 and 2021, both led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures. Currently, Anoma has raised a total of $25 million in three rounds of financing.

Conduit

Conduit is an infrastructure platform aimed at enhancing and accelerating the capabilities of crypto developers, its first product allows startups to quickly launch product-grade Rollups built on the OP Stack. Rollups on Conduit that are focused on specific APPs are initiated, maintained, and expanded by infrastructure architecture experts, so that startup teams can focus on creating products that users love. Deploying on Conduit comes with a built-in block explorer, automatic RPC scaling, a transaction tracker developed by Paradigm researcher samsczuns, and deployment that runs the same technology as the Optimism mainnet and is protected by Ethereum.

Conduit completed a $7 million seed round of financing led by Paradigm in March of this year, with participants including Robert Miller, the product lead of MEV R&D organization Flashbots, former OpenAI original designer Ludwig Pettersson, and others.

Hooks on top of Uniswap v4

The Hooks feature is one of the major updates to Uniswap v4 and enables customizable mobility pools.

Panoptic

Panoptic is a permanent, oracle-free options protocol built on Ethereum, creating options by building on top of Uniswap v3 liquidity pools. Providing liquidity to the Uniswap v3 pool is similar to shorting options, while reversing the liquidity position creates a theoretically bullish option return. However, because each Uniswap position is unique and non-fungible, implementing a structure that loans from LP positions is not possible. Panoptic creates options-like returns by using the moving liquidity among ecosystem participants and charging commissions to facilitate transactions, i.e., if a token owns a Uniswap v3 pool, Panoptic can create an options market on top of that token pair using this method. Because Panoptic’s options are built on top of LP tokens, the pricing is path-dependent and does not rely on the oracle-dependent Black-Scholes model, therefore Panoptic completely avoids the need for oracles. After the announcement of Uniswap v4, Panoptic also emphasized that Uniswap v4 will be a significant part of its roadmap.

In December 2022, Panoptic announced a $4.5 million financing round led by Gumi Cryptos Capital, with participants including Uniswap Labs Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and others.

Arrakis Finance

Arrakis Finance is a trustless market-making infrastructure protocol running miscellaneous algorithmic strategies built on Uniswap v3. LPs can manage liquidity using Arrakis’s smart contract vaults Trustless Vaults, Managed Vaults operated by professional market makers, and Self Managed Vaults; professional market makers can offer to manage other LPs’ liquidity in exchange for a share of commission income. Currently, Arrakis Finance’s TVL is nearly $190 million. On July 21, Arrakis co-hosted a brainstorming marathon event with the Uniswap Foundation about building and thinking about v4 hooks.

Arrakis Finance raised $4.5 million in seed financing through a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT) in December 2022, with participants including Uniswap Labs Ventures, Polygon Ventures, and others.

Infra for a rollup-centric, multi-chain world

A blockchain infrastructure that supports Rollup scaling technology and multi-chain interaction.

Connext Network

Connext Network is a modular protocol used to securely transfer funds and data between chains. Developers can use Connext to build applications (xAPPs) that can operate across multiple domains (blockchains/Rollups). Connext considers three core design principles: modularity, security, and simplicity. Arjun, a core contributor to the Connext Network, has stated that the best way to reduce hack attacks is to leverage existing, battle-tested infrastructure as much as possible and to promote a Rollup-centric future, with Connext using existing Rollup Bridges as tracks for message verification to achieve this.

Connext completed a $7.5 million financing round at a valuation of $250 million in June this year, with a total historical financing amount of $23.5 million. Participants included Coinbase Ventures, IOSG, Polygon Ventures, and Fenbushi Capital.

AltLayer

AltLayer is a decentralized and elastic Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) protocol. AltLayer adopts a modular design throughout the stack, and end users can select Rollups according to their own needs: preferred runtimes, such as EVM, WASM, etc., data availability layers, such as underlying L1, Celestia, etc., and settlement layers, such as Ethereum, Arbitrum One, etc. In addition to modularity, AltLayer’s core features also include elasticity that can scale with applications, multi-VM support, fraud proofing, decentralized sorters, layered termination, and no-code Rollup launch.

AltLayer completed a $7.2 million seed round through SAFT in July 2022, co-led by Polychain Capital, Jump Crypto, and Breyer Capital. Participants included Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot founder Gavin Wood and Circle co-founder Sean Neville, among others.

Shared sequencers

The sequencer is important for some Rollups expansion solutions. The role of the sequencer is to collect transactions from users and then sort them in a predictable manner. The order in which they are sorted will determine the order in which the transactions are processed in the chain, which in turn affects the execution and validation of the transactions.

Radius

Radius is a trustless shared sorter aimed at eliminating harmful MEV and censorship while creating economic value for Rollup. Based on a ZK encryption scheme, Radius implements an encrypted memory pool created by Practical Verifiable Delay Encryption (PVDE). Through PVDE, trustless sorting of transactions can be ensured, preventing centralized sorters from leading, sandwiching, or censoring user transactions.

Radius completed a $1.7 million seed pre-financing round led by Hashed in June of this year. Participants included Crypto.com, among others.

Astria

Astria’s shared sorter is a middleware blockchain with its own decentralized sorter set that can accept transactions from multiple Rollups. These transactions are sorted into a single block and written into the base layer without execution. Rollups can retrieve from Astria immediately after the block is created.

Astria completed a $5.5 million seed financing round led by Maven 11 in April this year. Participants included 1kx, Delphi Ventures, and Figment Capital.

Onchain games

Games that run entirely on the blockchain.

Realms: Eternum

Eternum is a fully chain-based, open-source strategy game running on StarkNet with state changes recorded on Ethereum. It is a game of management and conquest, where players need to build and defend their realms to thrive. The game is governed by a set of rules, which will be executed by smart contracts, but these rules can also be changed by community voting.

Realms completed a community private placement of $625,000 in February this year, with an oversubscription rate of 6.35 times.

Parallel: Colony

Parallel Colony is an AI-driven simulation strategy game with all simulation projects running on the chain. Virtual avatars will be placed in mining colonies for exploration. Each virtual avatar in the game is an ERC-6551 wallet, meaning that virtual avatars will be able to own their own digital assets (ERC-20 and ERC-1155) and trade with other AI virtual avatars. In addition, not only can users issue commands to avatars, but the game also allows AI virtual avatars to take actions based on their own decisions or requests from other AIs.

Parallel completed a $50 million financing at a valuation of $500 million in October 2021, with investors including Paradigm, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, and others.

Crypto-native social apps

Social applications designed and implemented with blockchain and crypto features fully in mind.

Jambo

Jambo is building Web3 applications for African communities to advance cryptocurrency education, banking, and entertainment. It aims to be a one-stop shop for cryptocurrency and includes games such as Axie Infinity. It has already launched JamboAcademy for African users in partnership with local partners and community leaders to provide crypto education. JamboAcademy is a 10-week learning program with income and rewards.

In May 2022, Jambo completed a $30 million Series A funding round led by Paradigm, with participation from ParaFi Capital, Pantera Capital, and Delphi Ventures among others. Seed round investors also included Tiger Global and Coinbase Ventures. Jambo is Paradigm’s first investment in an African project.

Lens Protocol

Lens is a Web3 community graph built on the Polygon, and it’s also one of the most renowned social protocols in crypto-native world. Lens aims to enable creators to own their connections with their community, forming a fully composable, user-owned community network. The content of the Lens protocol is supported by NFTs, enabling monetization while ensuring users’ ownership of content and social relationships remains intact.

Lens Protocol completed a $15 million financing round led by IDEO CoLab Ventures in June this year, with participants including Blockchain Capital, Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams, and others.

Prediction markets

Prediction markets are markets that aggregate public predictions on various things, from weather conditions to election results and beyond. It’s worth noting that this track has not received much attention before, and the development of the projects has been somewhat limited. It can be considered as the least popular field that Paradigm is focusing on.

Polymarket

Polymarket claims to be the largest decentralized crypto prediction market, covering areas including politics, sports, crypto, culture, economics, and more. A user named “Severe-Watch”: 0x64…6f1f has made over $910,000 in earnings through predictions, making them the highest-earning user on the Polymarket market so far; while “Slava-Ukraini”: 0x9d…1344 has contributed the highest trading volume on the platform exceeding $1 million, earning about $19,000. According to data panel by @richardchen39, Polymarket has around 1,000 monthly active users.

Polymarket completed a $4 million financing round led by Polychain Capital in October 2020, with participation from investors such as ParaFi and 1confirmation.

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist is a prediction market built on Polkadot, supported by the Web3 Foundation and ConsenSys alumni. Similar to Polymarket, it offers predictions across politics, crypto, technology, science, news, sports, and esports, but in addition, Zeitgeist also offers some fun predictions within the Polkadot ecosystem, such as with Dotsama and their own platform, Zeitgeist. Furthermore, Zeitgeist provides a more diverse range of prediction subjects and supports betting with DOT.

Zeitgeist completed a $14 million financing round in November 2021, with participation from investors such as Longhash Capital and Icon Plus Capital.

Stablecoin payments/fintech

FDUSD

FDUSD is a programmable US dollar stablecoin issued by Hong Kong company FD121 Limited (First Digital Labs). Its auditor is Prescient Assurance and contract auditor is PeckShield, but it has not disclosed its partner bank. The related parties to the FDUSD reserve account are a publicly registered trust company in Hong Kong, acting as the custodian, which has deposited US dollars representing the company into various accounts of different institutions, including a Swiss financial institution and a Hong Kong-affiliated trust company. FDUSD recently launched on Binance.

First Digital completed a $20 million financing in May 2022, with participation from Nogle and Kenetic Capital. So far, First Digital has completed a total of 3 rounds of financing, raising a total of $25.15 million.

Lightspark

Lightspark is a payment company building enterprise-grade infrastructure based on the Bitcoin Lightning Network, founded by former Facebook crypto chief David Marcus. Platforms like Bitcoin custody bank Xapo Bank and Rain, the largest crypto asset platform in the Middle East and North Africa, have integrated into the Lightspark ecosystem via the Lightspark Wallet SDK. In April this year, Lightspark announced the launch of the first enterprise-level entry platform for the Lightning Network.

Lightspark completed an undisclosed round of financing in May 2022, co-led by a16z and Paradigm, with participation from Matrix Partners and Thrive Capital among others. According to insiders at The Block, the round raised $173 million at a valuation of $1 billion.

Onchain treasuries

Bringing real-world assets led by U.S. Treasury bonds onto the blockchain. Real-World Assets (RWA) is one of the hottest areas in Crypto this year, with MakerDAO being the biggest beneficiary. Compared to some DeFi protocols, tokenized treasury bonds offer higher returns and lower risks.

Ondo Finance

Ondo Finance holds a tokenization market share second only to Franklin Templeton Fund. Currently, Ondo Finance has four RWA products, providing investors with a range of cash management products and bond funds, including short-term US Treasury bonds (OUSG) and the soon-to-be-launched tokenized money market fund (OMMF). The total value locked (TVL) in OUSG has reached $160 million, providing an APY of 5.13%.

In April 2022, Ondo Finance completed a $20 million Series A financing round led by Founders Fund and Pantera Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute, and Tiger Global. In July of the same year, they raised $10 million through a public sale on Coinlist.

Maple Finance

Originally an unsecured loan protocol on the Ethereum, Maple Finance was severely impacted by the sudden collapse of its major client Alameda. In April this year, Maple launched cash management pools for USDC and USDT, mainly providing for the conservative risk and daily liquidity needs of DAOs, offshore companies, and Web3 treasuries, backed by US short-term treasury bills and reverse repo agreements. Currently, the Maple USDC and USDT cash management pools hold about $21 million in deposits, providing an APY of 4.64% and 4.28% respectively.

Maple Finance completed a $1.4 million funding round in March 2021, led by Framework Ventures and Polychain Capital, and raised $10.33 million through an IDO in May of the same year. In December of last year, as the impact of FTX’s sudden collapse spread, crypto fund Orthogonal Trading defaulted on a $36 million loan to Maple Finance, accounting for 30% of active loans; Maple Finance expects to recover at least $2.5 million to minimize losses.

ZKP apps

Applications Using Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Zero-knowledge proofs allow one party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that they know the secret of a value without disclosing the value or providing any other information about it.

Ulvetanna

Ulvetanna provides fast, cost-effective, and streamlined zero-knowledge proof computations. The FPGA clusters it operates are tailored for large-scale ZKP computations, designed to support L1 and L2 blockchain protocols. Ulvetanna has assembled a cross-disciplinary team, including applied cryptographers, software and hardware engineers, data center and cloud architects, and crypto-native investors, collectively designing hardware and software stacks from encryption algorithms to data center topologies.

In December 2022, Ulvetanna completed a $15 million seed round co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and Paradigm, with participation from Jump Crypto.

Dark Forest

Dark Forest is the first MMORTS whole chain game built with zk-SNARKs on the Gnosis Chain and Ethereum, launched by Argus Labs. Since the release of its first test version on the Ethereum Ropsten testnet in August 2020, Dark Forest has been the most popular and active application of ZKP in the gaming field.

The developer of Dark Forest, Argus Labs, completed a $10 million seed funding round in June this year, led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Alchemy and Robot Ventures, among others.

Reference:

https://www.paradigm.xyz/2023/07/collaborate-with-paradigm

https://blog.anoma.net/the-anoma-foundation-announces-the-3rd-fundraise-for-anoma/

https://conduit.xyz/blog/introducing-conduit

https://blog.panoptic.xyz/panoptic-483c6de77a0e

https://blog.astria.org/introducing-astria/

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