Protocol Village: Crypto VC Contango Brings in $5M to Seed Companies Focused on Blockchain, AI

Contango Digital Assets, a crypto-focused venture capital firm, "reached its first close on their $10 million seed fund, bringing in $5 million to support seed round companies building at the intersection of blockchain and AI," according to the team: "Investors in the Contango Blockchain x AI Fund include XVentures, the CEO of Quantstamp, CFO at SingularityNet, CEO at WonderFi, early LPs in Digital Currency Group and Polychain Capital and investors from Vanta DAO. With strong backing, the fund is poised to help drive forward the convergence of blockchain and AI technologies."

Mayan Finance, Cross-Chain Swap Auction Protocol on Solana, Raises $3M

April 14: Mayan Finance, a cross-chain swap auction protocol on Solana, has raised $3 million in a seed round, led by 6MV and Borderless, according to the team: "The innovative auction protocol attracts support from Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, and Saeed Badreg, co-founder of Wormhole. Mayan has already achieved impressive growth since its mid-2023 launch, surpassing $470 million in volume and becoming a core connector for Solana, Ethereum, and major Web3 ecosystems. Mayan is powering inter-chain swaps on Drift and MarginFi, while other projects like Backpack use Mayan's open-source SDK with custom UI for in-wallet cross-chain swaps."

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Berachain Closes $100M Series B Funding Round

April 12: Blockchain platform Berachain closed oversubscribed Series B funding round, securing $100 million, according to the team: "Framework Ventures, one of the earliest VC firms to enter the DeFi space, and Brevan Howard Digital’s Abu Dhabi branch co-led the round. With 200+ applications committed to building on the chain at launch, Berachain’s goal is to develop the first blockchain ecosystem that aligns incentives for security and liquidity at the network level, allowing the liquidity present on the network to also serve as a source of security. The blockchain’s novel 'Proof of Liquidity' consensus mechanism gives application developers a unique incentive to build and grow on Berachain."

Eoracle Says the Market Can Incentivize Better Data

April 12: Eoracle, a decentralized oracle network that recently launched staking on EigenLayer, aims to enhance Ethereum's security and data reliability through a trust marketplace – an incentive for accurate data, as founder and CEO Matan Sibon put it in an interview with CoinDesk. Creating a credible, neutral marketplace through eoracle allows for the matching of supply and demand with free market pricing, thereby fostering a more diverse and unbiased oracle ecosystem that significantly reduces operational costs, Sibon said. "We think that a marketplace, an open market, a free market, is the best way of finding and allowing price discovery to any asset or service," he said. Through EigenLayer, eoracle can use a decentralized network of Ethereum validators, enhancing the trust, diversity and security of the oracle system without requiring validators to provide additional, separate stakes. Sibon said that the next step for eoracle is the launch of a mainnet to enhance integration with Ethereum rollups and expand functionalities. – By Sam Reynolds in Taipei.

Chainlink Aims to Make Transfers Across Blockchains Safer with New Bridge App 'Transporter'

April 12: Data provider Chainlink unveiled Thursday its blockchain bridge application called "Transporter," which allows users to move crypto assets and data across multiple networks. Chainlink's bridge is available for both individual users and institutions and aims to allow "a cost-efficient way to make high-value token transfers across blockchains with peace of mind," a Chainlink spokesperson explained in an interview on Telegram. The first available blockchains for Transporter are Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, and WEMIX, the press release said. CoinDesk 20 asset: (LINK)

Tate Berenbaum Launches 'AO Ventures,' With $35M for Arweave Development

April 11: Tate Berenbaum, who reportedly raised $30 million while still a teenager for crypto startup Community Labs, has launched of AO Ventures, a 10-week incubator program dedicated to fostering development on Arweave and AO, according to a message from Berenbaum. "Over $35 million in capital has already been committed to the investment pool. The program will start in April and culminate in a Demo Day in June." AO is described on the Community Labs website as a "hyper parallel computer" with a core objective of "merging the benefits of trust minimization with the speed and traditional computing environments." The Arweave network is for "permanent information storage," according to its website. (AR)

QED Launches L2O Consortium to Develop Bitcoin Layer 2 Solutions

April 11: QED Protocol, the world's first zk-native blockchain protocol, together with StarkWare, zkLink, Mina Protocol, O(1) Labs, announced the launch of the L2O Consortium, a group of projects and protocols committed to bringing Bitcoin’s native security, internet scale, and interoperability to applications and Layer 2 solutions. According to a press release: "The consortium is developing reference implementations, tools, and resources for developers looking to build DApps or deploy Layer 2s on top of Bitcoin and enable trustless interoperability between applications by coordinating standards across solutions, leveraging ordinals and zero-knowledge proofs to bridge the technical gaps that previously hampered smart contract-like functionality on Bitcoin." The reference implementations are here in the project documentation.