0G Labs, a web3 infrastructure firm,” has raised $35 million in a pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch.
“In order to build the basic technology, we wanted to raise $5 million, originally,” said 0G co-founder Michael Heinrich.
0G, sometimes called ZeroGravity, is creating a modular AI blockchain that aims to alleviate the pain points of on-chain AI applications in the web3 ecosystem, like speed and cost efficiency.
On-chain AI and gaming requires a fast data pipeline.
It also plans to enable new use cases and things that were not possible before like on-chain AI, on-chain gaming and high-frequency decentralized finance (DeFi).
A new web3 network is being built right now that wants to end Big Tech’s control of your dataMany of the people building Web3 feel like the traditional web ecosystem has taken advantage of users and their data.
It’s the initial team supporting The Graph, a decentralized network that indexes, queries and organizes data.
It has been called the “Google of web3” and aims to organize open blockchain data and make open data a public good.
“Web3 is still being built, we’re still working on building this decentralized internet that is censorship resistant.
“The one thing that’s really important about AI is that it’s all about data,” Kline said.
Rails, a decentralized crypto exchange, has raised $6.2 million in attempts to fill the void FTX left behind after crashing in 2022, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Satraj Bambra exclusively told TechCrunch.
The crypto community is watching Rails because it’s attempting to straddle the divide in crypto exchanges by building out both centralized and decentralized underlying technology.
The capital is earmarked for engineering team hiring and expanding its licensing and regulatory strategy to make the exchange “fully compliant,” Bambra said.
That centralized computing was something Rails saw with FTX as “being really, really good,” but when it came to decentralized exchanges like dYdX that exist today it wasn’t as solid, Bambra thinks.
But being a hybrid of decentralized and centralized is better than being fully one side or another, he added.
Appzone is one of the standout local fintech software providers for banks and fintechs, providing better pricing and flexibility.
As such, it rebranded to Zone, a licensed blockchain-enabled payment infrastructure company–and carved out its original banking-as-a-service business into a separate standalone company, Qore.
Today, Zone, its blockchain network that enables payments and acceptance of digital currencies, is announcing that it has raised $8.5 million in a seed round.
Therefore, the fintech is developing an interoperable payment infrastructure using blockchain technology — known for its ability to scale infinitely — to connect banks and fintech companies, facilitating transaction flow without intermediaries.
“We are excited by the potential for Zone’s technology to be replicated across borders to advance payment innovation globally.
Convinced that the infrastructure layer for truly decentralized social apps was lacking, he decided to fill the void, leading to Taiko’s inception in March 2022.
A truly decentralized social networkFor Wang, Taiko provides a critical building block for a social network that is truly owned by users.
The ideal decentralized social app, despite its greater technical challenges, could allow: “1.
Censorship resistance… and thus, freedom of speech.”One of the greatest challenges facing decentralized social apps is content quality and safety.
Each relayer can then filter content that reflects the “unique perspectives” of the underlying decentralized social network, thereby attracting diverse user bases.
Ever since Hong Kong legalized cryptocurrency trading last June, blockchain projects from the West have been paying more attention to the Asian financial hub.
Aptos, the a16z-backed blockchain network developed by a group of former Meta employees, is one of them.
Started by some of the original creators of Meta’s abandoned crypto payment project Diem, Aptos is set to host a DeFi event in Hong Kong this April.
When asked when users in Hong Kong will get access to Aptos-based DeFi services, the founder said he cannot speculate on regulation.
“I do think Hong Kong regulators are moving things in the right direction and forward and providing clarity for entrepreneurs to build.
Decentralized social network Mastodon has updated its official app for Android to let users easily share their profiles with QR Codes.
To share the QR code, users can go to their profile tab and tap the QR icon next to their name to get a code related to the profile others can scan.
Mastodon has also updated prompts for blocking and muting to explain the effects of taking those actions on a profile.
Users trying out Mastodon have complained about the complicated nature of having different servers on the ActivityPub network.
The company will have to work on making it easier for users to understand and navigate the decentralized social world.
Reddit’s long-awaited IPO is nearing, promising to be the largest social media IPO since Pinterest.
Meanwhile, Mastodon, and the wider network of apps connected to the “Fediverse” as the decentralized social web is called, has a combined 17.2 million users.
Just as some Twitter users broke away to join decentralized alternatives, once they became viable alternatives, Reddit users could also do the same.
If Meta fears the power of decentralized social networks enough to join the movement, surely Reddit is not immune?
Seeing their demands ignored and overridden could eventually drive them to find new homes on decentralized social media, where they would maintain control over their communities and user data.
When the large cloud providers have excess compute capacity, they tend to discount it through programs like AWS’s and Azure’s spot instances.
While in the recovery room, Surkov shared his idea for a company that would make this excess data center capacity available to developers.
Because of his experience with networking at Cisco and decentralized systems in crypto, Surkov had become interested in why there is so much friction in using decentralized compute.
In addition to these decentralized projects, NodeShift has also set up deals with independent data center operators.
Just on the data center side, the company says, it currently has access to about 400,000 CPUs and 28 million terabytes of storage.
Today, the social magazine app Flipboard is announcing it has also now integrated with ActityPub.
That changed this year, when Flipboard shifted its Twitter integration over to Mastodon and another alternative social app, Bluesky.
All this was in the lead-up to making Flipboard itself a federated social app, a process that’s kicking off today.
As this rolls out, all Flipboard users will have one Flipboard.com account connected to the fediverse, even if they host numerous Flipboard magazines.
Today, Flipboard has over 10,000 publishers of social magazines on its app and over a quarter million individuals who are curating content using Flipboard’s app.
