YC 22: 30 Crypto Startups that made it
Getting backed by Y Combinator is just the right kickstart for any new startup. Y Combinator is a well-known startup accelerator program that organizes two-three months sessions every year. It offers a complete package of support and service by making the startups on board attend individual one-on-one advising sessions with partners to the final Demo Day — a presentation to investors and the press.
The partnership with Y Combinator allows the participants to utilize the alum network, engage in office hours, and bag additional network funding. YC invests $500,000 in every company through two separate instalments and an investment of $125,000 in a post-money safe for 7% of the company.
Various startups in the crypto/blockchain space made it to the Y Combinator list and are now the names to reckon with in the industry. Equipped with the right amount of support in resources and investment, NFT marketplace OpenSea and portfolio tracking and accounting software CoinTracker graduated from Y Combinator.
In fact, In Y Combinator’s latest list of startups, there are 30 startups from the industry, up from 26 in the previous batch. This is a testament to the fact that the accelerator and the founders are betting on and believe in the adage, “there’s no better time to build than during a downturn.”
To top it up, crypto startups account for 13% of the companies in this summer’s YC cohort, in contrast to 6% of the prior W22 YC batch. This simply reflects a 2x rise in the percentage share of crypto companies participating in the accelerator’s program in just a few months.
List of Crypto Startups in the YC list
1. Terrace
Area of Focus: Institutional grade trading solutions for DeFi
Terrace is a regulatory-compliant, one-stop institutional-grade trading UI / terminal and infrastructure layer for DeFi that encompasses lending, staking, liquidity, borrowing, exchange, and derivatives across multiple protocols and chains.
Its key offerings include a curated and security-verified selection of DeFi pools with immaculate money movement using both — a set of APIs and a user interface.
They have an expertise in handling custody, money movement, execution, and reporting along with providing continuous security and compliance monitoring to enable investors to focus completely on investing.
2. Ping
Area of Focus: International payments
Ping is an application that aims to solve the hurdles of getting paid internationally when clients are outside a particular country. Ping allows international contractors and freelancers to create their own personal US account and a crypto account regardless of where they live.
Opening a ping account is free of charge and the account allows users to send invoices, receive payments and choose to save, transfer, withdraw or convert the money to cryptocurrency. In association with the company, the workers make on average 4% more money and get paid the same day.
3. Blockscope
Area of Focus: On-chain data
On a mission to enable everyone to easily access and consume on-chain data, Blockscope made it to Y Combinator.
Blockscope is a Web3 data platform that enables interested participants of on-chain data to quickly spin up live or historical data pipelines for blocks, events, wallets, tokens, etc. It is an all-in-one platform that allows for storage, analytics and integrations across all popular chains to supercharge web3 development. Blockscope is built around the core idea of off-loading the on-chain data that their customers need for Web3 apps, and safely storing them for quick access.
4. Jasmine
Area of Focus: Renewable credits and climate Assets
Jasmine is a decentralized market for climate assets that makes it easy to claim, trade, and redeem renewable energy certificates (RECs). Jasmine is on a mission to accelerate the net-zero transition by building climate asset markets that are accessible and transparent to everyone.
5. Excheqr
Area of Focus: Crypto treasury management
Excheqr is a secure platform that facilitates the management of digital assets across multiple chains. The platform offers services and helps Web3 teams and DAOs to run their treasury operations, institutions to manage digital assets and access DeFi safely, and lastly, individuals to secure high value digital assets.
Some of the key features of the platform include gasless wallet creation, non-custodial vaults, address book management, access to DeFi with portfolio monitoring, and flexible threshold signing schemes. Excheqr also has a research arm that is focused on leveraging cutting-edge cryptography and blockchain developments to enhance Web3 security.
6. Trendex
Area of Focus: Tokenization of Talents
Trendex is an application that allows users to share successes of athletes, artists and creators by exchanging tokens that are linked to their performance. The value of the tokens (shares) evolves throughout the careers of the talents and as the talent’s audience grows, the value increases.
The application also allows users to generate passive income every week, earn exclusive perks and trade the shares of talents to earn money. Trendex has signed more than 60+ talents under exclusive contracts for 20 years.
7. Rampay
Area of Focus: Payment gateway / Fiat <> Crypto onramp
Rampay is a global payment gateway that allows individuals to seamlessly buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Rampays bridges between fiat and crypto, empowering web3 applications to have a seamless checkout experience and onboard users across the world through local payment methods.
Some of the key features of Rampay include support for 150+ fiat currencies and over 100+ cryptocurrencies; support across SEA, Africa and LATAM; and payment through credit/debit cards, bank transfers and many more.
8. Mintplex
Area of Focus: Tools for launching NFT projects without code
Mintplex provides all the tools to help collectors, developers and communities launch NFT projects and grow them without code. From handling IPFS, smart contracts, minting pages to providing utility to communities, Mintplex offers all the tools that are required to start an NFT project. Key features of Mintplex include tailor-made contracts, one-click deployments, insights & analytics, and the free for all aspect.
9. Bitstack
Area of Focus: Saving and Investing in bitcoin
Bitstack is a mobile application that allows people in Europe to effortlessly save and invest in Bitcoin. Compliant with AMF regulations and European banking security standards, the app rounds up individuals’ everyday purchases and automatically invests the spare change in bitcoin.
Starting with 1 euro by card, setting recurring saving, to selling and withdrawing bitcoin anytime, the platform provides freedom and convenience to users.
10. Zoltar Labs
Area of Focus: Smart contract testing
Zoltar is a unique developer tool for Web3 companies to accelerate the velocity of smart contract testing and deployment to 10x.
Its developer tool is a controlled test environment where anyone on the team can configure and run simulations with CI/CD capabilities built in. Smart contracts are deployed with a single command to a private instance of an EVM-compatible blockchain.
11. Chainsight
Area of Focus: Detection solution for crypto scams
Chainsight is a platform that provides background check API services that detects and prevents users from transacting with malicious dApps, wallets, NFTs or phishing sites. Chainsight monitors over 300,000 dApps, 100 million phishing sites, and 25 billion transactions to keep users’ digital assets safe and secure anytime, anywhere. The platform also has multiple other products that include Web3 analytics, blockchain investigation and blockchain labelled data.
12. Metafi
Area of Focus: Blockchain gaming infrastructure
Metafi is building blockchain infrastructure for Web3 games, by embedding a Web3 wallet in games with just five lines of code.
With its SDK, game developers not just embed wallet within their game but also broadcast transactions to multiple chains and decipher on-chain events that affect the state of their game. Simply put, with the MetFi plug and play SDK, anyone can build a Web3 game without hiring any blockchain devs.
13. The402
Area of Focus: Live Streaming
The402 is a platform that helps creators monitise their superfans through livestreams and NFTs. Artists are able to perform in private livestreams and superfans attend the streams by purchasing an NFT.
14. Rio
Area of Focus: Buying & selling Crypto in LATAM
Rio makes buying and selling in crypto easier with its aggregation services already available in 180+ countries. It lets its users buy and sell crypto for any wallet in 5 minutes or less. Its global coverage allows it to register with regional authorities and use local infrastructure, thus enabling it to offer better prices and more convenient payment options while remaining fully regulated.
15. Supercool
Area of Focus: Secure NFT Minting
Supercool is an NFT mint marketplace that allows users to discover new NFT projects and mint those NFTs securely from a simple interface. Supercool’s mission is to make the NFT market more secure so that more people and institutions can participate in the space. It runs several security checks and transaction simulations on NFT contracts to ensure that the users stay protected when minting.
16. Notebook Labs
Area of Focus: Identity authentication and KYC for Crypto
Notebook is a protocol that solves Web3 identity problem by using Zero-Knowledge to produce both anonymous proof-of-humanity and credential aggregation.
Notebook initially verifies users’ identifying information to confirm that every person has just one Notebook. Neither Notebook, nor the other company knows the link between a user’s personal information and their Notebook. Once a user’s account is made they’ll begin proving their humanity and aggregating their credentials across wallets. It is well-known to increase the security of DeFi, governance, and airdrops.
17. Sylva
Area of Focus: Wallet providing cross-chain interest
Sylva is making a web3 wallet that automatically opens doors for the user to access true cross-chain interest on their crypto, without sacrificing exposure to their original assets. The investment protocol and wallet allows users to hold popular coins, while benefiting from high staking rewards of smaller coins.
18. Lyra
Area of Focus: Crypto spending anywhere
Lyra is a crypto-native virtual card provider that allows users to easily create cards and fund them with cryptocurrency. Users can create virtual cards directly from their browser through Chrome extension for all their purchases and subscriptions.
19. EthosX
Area of Focus: Options Protocol
EthosX is a decentralized finance platform creating end-to-end financial derivatives on blockchains by obviating the need to have centralized exchanges, clearinghouses, depositories, clearing banks, CSD participants. EthosX is starting with crypto options first, with the intention to move towards other crypto derivatives and traditional finance derivatives in the future. The protocol also provides derivatives infrastructure to other crypto companies who want to use its products as a part of a larger package.
20. Kapstar
Area of Focus: Cross-border transactions
Founded in 2022, Kapstar provides an online solution to make your shipment whenever you want, at the lowest price. It helps cheapen and improve the experience of foreign exchange operations in international trade, preserving the margin of importers and exporters.
It offers a frictionless UX and very low fees for cross-border transactions tied to a USD checking account based on crypto stablecoins.
21. Openpod
Area of Focus: DAO Infrastructure tool
Openpod is a DAO-as-a-service platform that helps open-source projects to incentivise developer contribution and makes fundraising easy. With Openpod, projects can use these governance tokens to compensate developers for their work, let early investors purchase these tokens, and reward their community.
22. Alterya
Area of Focus: Data Infrastructure tool
Alterya enables Web3 pioneers to develop better financial products by sourcing them with a comprehensive data infrastructure for decentralized ecosystems. It’s unified API gives easy access to any DeFi protocol. Alterya enables wallets and other financial services to fetch financial data of users and execute transactions without having to integrate with endless protocols.
23. Internet Friends
Area of Focus: Wallet
Internet Friends is an Ethereum wallet that users can use with friends to purchase and use crypto assets together.
24. Stackup
Area of Focus: Mobile wallet
Stackup is a mobile wallet that makes it easy for beginners to use crypto, enabling anyone to buy any crypto token or NFT instantly. Unlike beginners who have to do numerous tasks to buy an NFT, Stackup users simply have to download the app, deposit dollars into their wallet, and buy.
25. Immuna
Area of Focus: Crypto exploit detection
Immuna is a one-stop platform for crypto investors to manage their risks of investing in digital assets. It monitors and actively defends investors’ crypto investments from unexpected exploits and undesirable economic situations. Immuna detects on-chain exploits in real-time and extracts invested assets on behalf of the investors without requiring access to their private keys.
26. Derisk
Area of Focus: Custody software for businesses
Derisk is building a custody software that securely manages the keys for web3 businesses by leveraging an innovative cryptographic protocol Multi Party Computation (MPC).
27. Solstar
Area of Focus: Crypto for Communities
SolStar builds easy-to-use crypto tools for Discord communities. The users don’t really have to go through the confusing steps and instead can make effective use of Solstar — a secure, approachable tool that makes crypto fun. Users simply add a Tip Bot to their Discord, check their balance, and send a tip to a friend — all within a few minutes.
28. Probably Nothing Labs
Area of Focus: Data Infrastructure for Web3
Probably Nothing Labs is building cross-chain real-time data infrastructure for crypto. Their product, Gigabrain, is a best-in-class indexer that is able to parse, index and store transactions within seconds of blocks being confirmed.
29. Weltio
Area of Focus: Wealth Management for LatAm users
Weltio is an application that gives LatAm users access to a fully fledged brokerage account in USD, through features such as local instant cash rails, robo-advisor and tailored portfolio. Weltio also decodes crypto investment by helping users to build their own crypto portfolio.
30. Coinbooks
Area of Focus: Crypto accounting
Coinbooks is a crypto accounting software that allows businesses to easily track income, expenses and more. The software simplifies reconciliation and integrates with hundreds of exchanges and chains; and existing accounting softwares like Quickbooks, Xero and Netsuite to make a unified dashboard.
Reach out to us
All the 30 startups that have made their way to the Y Combinator list have made it clear that the crypto and Web3 industry is taking over the world and revolutionising the internet and businesses of today.
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About Rising Capital
Rising Capital is a Singapore head-quartered ‘Digital Assets Asset Management’ firm focussed on early stage blockchain investments (Rising Funds) and venture building studio (Rising Studios) in South & South East Asia. Since 2013, the team has built, operated and sold several crypto ventures before setting up ‘Rising’ to capture significant return asymmetries by picking and investing in brilliant founders, while keeping a majority of investments in liquid assets.Our experience & global network allows us to be at the forefront of changing narratives in crypto such as NFT, Gaming, Metaverse, L1s and L2s, along with advancements in blockchain protocol technologies by conducting thorough research on the “next big things” while managing risk with proper licences, audits, compliance and security management.
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