Multi-dimensional inventory of LianGuairadigm’s top 10 projects in the relevant fields of concern.

LianGuairadigm's top 10 projects in relevant fields.

Original author: defioasis, Wu Shuo Real

Note: This article is for information sharing only and does not endorse the mentioned projects or have any financial interest in them.

Recently, LianGuairadigm posted a heroic post, hoping to cooperate with excellent teams and talents in the field of encryption to solve important business and research problems. LianGuairadigm was founded in 2018 and raised $2.5 billion in venture capital in November 2021. As a research-oriented technology investment company, LianGuairadigm has delivered many excellent projects to the industry, and its investments in Uniswap, Lido, Blur, etc. have become the cornerstone of their respective tracks.

In the latest heroic post, LianGuairadgim stated that the important areas it is exploring include: intent-centered protocols and infrastructure, Hooks built on Uniswap v4 (especially focusing on LP profitability and loss rebalancing), multi-chain world infrastructure centered around Rollup, shared sorter, cross-chain games, crypto-native social applications, prediction markets (creating liquidity markets with real liquidity), stablecoin payments/financial technology, on-chain national debt, and ZKP apps.

This article will take stock of the projects in the key areas of LianGuairadigm from multiple dimensions such as project progress, financing, on-chain data, and social attention.

Intent-Centered Protocols and Infrastructure

In the past, developers designed and developed protocols that meet certain specifications or standards. These protocols have clear provisions in terms of functionality, performance, and security, but often overlook the actual needs and usage intent of end users. Being intent-centered means starting from the user’s perspective, designing protocols and infrastructure that provide a better user experience and match user needs based on the user’s goals or intentions.

Anoma

Anoma may be the first protocol explicitly designed with the concept of “intent” as its core architecture. Anoma, with intent at its core, introduces new elements (basic components or operations that make up a system or program), enabling existing Web 2.5 dApps to achieve complete decentralization, such as Optimism and ZK rollups, DEXs, NFT Marketplaces, or public goods platforms like Gitcoin. In addition, Anoma’s architecture was designed from the beginning for applications involving unlimited users and issuing an unlimited number of intents, making it easy to build new applications that may be tricky, restricted, or impossible to build on existing protocol architectures. These new applications include real-time rollups, multiparty and multivariate swaps, second-price sealed auctions, privacy-protected DAOs, game B economic systems such as plural currencies, collaborative finance, and heterotopias.

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. Anoma Foundation previously completed two rounds of financing led by Polychain Capital in 2020 and 2021, with participants including Coinbase Ventures. Currently, Anoma has raised a total of $25 million in three rounds of financing.

Conduit

Conduit is an infrastructure platform designed to enhance and accelerate the capabilities of cryptographic developers. Its first product allows startup teams to launch product-level rollups based on the OP Stack in a short period of time. The rollups of specific apps on Conduit are launched, maintained, and scaled by infrastructure architecture experts, allowing startup teams to focus on building products that users love. Conduit comes with a block explorer, automatic RPC extension, address labeling, and a transaction tracker developed by LianGuairadigm researcher samsczuns. The deployment runs the same technology as the Optimism mainnet and is protected by Ethereum.

In March of this year, Conduit completed a $7 million seed round of financing led by LianGuairadigm, with participation from MEV research organization Flashbots’ product lead Robert Miller, former OpenAI original designer Ludwig Pettersson, and others.

Hooks built on Uniswap v4

Hooks are one of the important updates of Uniswap v4, enabling customizable liquidity pools.

LianGuainoptic

LianGuainoptic is a permanent, non-oracle option protocol built on the Ethereum chain, creating options on top of the Uniswap v3 liquidity pool. Providing liquidity to the Uniswap v3 pool is similar to selling put options, and reversing the liquidity position creates theoretical long option returns. However, since each Uniswap position is unique and non-fungible, the structure of borrowing from LP positions cannot be implemented. LianGuainoptic uses the movement of liquidity between ecosystem participants, while charging commissions to facilitate transactions, to create option-like returns. That is, if LianGuainoptic owns the Uniswap v3 pool token, it can create an options market on that token pair using this approach. Because LianGuainoptic’s options are built on LP tokens, pricing is path-dependent and does not rely on the oracle’s Black-Scholes model, completely avoiding the need for oracles. After the announcement of Uniswap v4, LianGuainoptic also emphasized that Uniswap v4 will be an important part of its roadmap.

LianGuainoptic announced a $4.5 million financing round led by Gumi Cryptos Capital in December 2022, with participation from Uniswap Labs Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and others.

Arrakis Finance

Arrakis Finance is a trustless market-making infrastructure protocol built on Uniswap v3 that enables the execution of various algorithmic strategies. LPs can manage liquidity using Arrakis’ smart contract insurance libraries, including Trustless Vaults, Managed Vaults operated by professional market makers, and Self-Managed Vaults. Professional market makers can provide liquidity management services for other LPs in exchange for a share of commission income. Currently, Arrakis Finance has a TVL of nearly $190 million. On July 21st, Arrakis and Uniswap Foundation held a brainstorming marathon event on building and thinking about v4 hooks.

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

A Multi-chain World Infrastructure Centered around Rollup

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

Connext Network

Connext Network is a modular protocol for securely transferring funds and data between chains. Developers can use Connext to build cross-chain applications (xAPPs) that can interact with multiple domains (blockchains/Rollups). Connext considers three core design principles: modularity, security, and simplicity. Connext Network’s core contributor, Arjun, has stated that the best way to reduce hacker attacks is to leverage existing battle-tested infrastructure and drive towards a Rollup-centric future. Connext achieves this by utilizing existing Rollup Bridges as the track for message verification.

Connext completed a $7.5 million funding round with a valuation of $250 million in June of this year, with a total cumulative funding amount of $23.5 million. Investors include Coinbase Ventures, IOSG, Polygon Ventures, and Fenbushi Capital.

AltLayer

AltLayer is a decentralized and scalable Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) protocol. AltLayer adopts a modular design throughout the stack, allowing end users to choose their preferred Rollup: 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 include extensibility that can scale with applications, support for multiple virtual machines, fraud proofs, decentralized sorters, layered terminations, and codeless Rollup bootstrapping.

AltLayer completed a $7.2 million seed funding round led by Polychain Capital, Jump Crypto, and Breyer Capital in July 2022, with investors including Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot founder Gavin Wood and Circle co-founder Sean Neville.

Shared Sorters

Sorters are crucial for some Rollup scaling solutions. The sorter’s responsibility is to collect user transactions and sort them in a predictable manner. The order of sorting will determine the processing order of transactions on the chain, thereby affecting transaction execution and verification.

Radius

Radius is an trustless shared sorter designed to eliminate harmful MEV and censorship while creating economic value for Rollups. Based on a ZK-based encryption scheme, Radius implements encrypted memory pools created by practical verifiable delay encryption (PVDE). Through PVDE, trustless sorting of transactions can be ensured, preventing centralized sorters from front-running, sandwiching, or censoring user transactions.

Radius completed a $1.7 million seed pre-round led by Hashed in June of this year, with investors including Crypto.com.

Astria

Astria’s shared sorter is a middleware blockchain with its own decentralized sorter set that can accept transactions from multiple Rollups. These transactions will be sorted into a single block and written into the underlying layer without execution. Rollups can be retrieved from Astria immediately after block creation.

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

Full Chain 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 establish and defend their realms to thrive. The game is governed by a set of rules that will be enforced by smart contracts, but these rules can also be changed through community voting.

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

LianGuairallel: Colony

LianGuairallel Colony is an AI-driven simulation strategy game where all simulation projects run on the blockchain. Virtual avatars will be deployed to explore mining colonies. Each virtual avatar in the game is an ERC-6551 wallet, which means that the avatars can own their own digital assets (ERC-20 and ERC-1155) and trade with other AI avatars. In addition, not only can users give commands to the avatars, but the game also allows AI avatars to take actions based on their own decisions or requests from other AIs.

LianGuairallel completed a $50 million financing at a valuation of $500 million in October 2021, with participants including LianGuairadigm, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, etc.

Crypto-Native Social Apps

Social applications designed and implemented with consideration for blockchain and cryptocurrency features.

Jambo

Jambo is building Web3 applications for the African community to promote cryptocurrency education, banking, and entertainment. It aims to become a one-stop shop for cryptocurrencies and includes games like Axie Infinity. Jambo Academy has been launched for African users through partnerships with local partners and community leaders for cryptocurrency education. Jambo Academy is a 10-week learning program with income and rewards.

Jambo completed a $30 million Series A financing led by LianGuairadigm in May 2022, with participation from LianGuairaFi Capital, LianGuaintera Capital, Delphi Ventures, etc. Seed round investors include Tiger Global and Coinbase Ventures. Jambo is the first investment in an African project by LianGuairadigm.

Lens Protocol

Lens is a Web3 community graph built on the Polygon chain and is one of the most well-known crypto-native social protocols. Lens aims to empower creators to have their own connections with the community, forming a fully composable community network owned by the users themselves. The Lens protocol is supported by NFTs, allowing users to monetize their content and social relationships while retaining ownership.

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

Prediction Market

A prediction market is a market that collects public predictions on various things, ranging from weather conditions to election results. It is worth noting that this track has received little attention in the past and project development has been relatively limited, making it the most niche area of interest for LianGuairadigm.

Polymarket

Polymarket claims to be the largest decentralized crypto prediction market, covering prediction areas such as politics, sports, crypto, culture, and economy. A user named Severe – Watch, with the address 0x64…6f1f, earned over $910,000 in revenue through predictions, making them the most profitable user on the Polymarket platform. Another user named Slava – Ukraini, with the address 0x9d…1344, contributed the highest trading volume on the platform, exceeding $1 million, with a profit of approximately $19,000. According to data from @richardchen39, Polymarket has a monthly active user base of about 1,000.

Polymarket completed a $4 million financing led by Polychain Capital in October 2020, with participants including LianGuairaFi and 1confirmation.

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist is a prediction market built on Polkadot, supported by Web3 Foundation and ConsenSys alumni. Similar to Polymarket, it provides predictions in areas such as politics, crypto, technology, science, news, sports, and esports. However, what sets Zeitgeist apart is that it also offers some fun predictions about the Polkadot ecosystem, such as predictions about Dotsama and the platform itself. Additionally, Zeitgeist has a more diverse range of prediction assets and supports DOT betting.

Zeitgeist completed a $14 million financing in November 2021, with participants including Longhash Capital and Icon Plus Capital.

Stablecoin Payments/FinTech

FDUSD

FDUSD is a programmable USD stablecoin issued by Hong Kong-based company FD 121 Limited (First Digital Labs). FDUSD is audited by Prescient Assurance and contract audited by PwC, but the cooperating bank has not been disclosed. The related party of FDUSD’s reserve account is a publicly registered trust company in Hong Kong and acts as a custodian. The custodian has deposited the USD held by the company in different accounts in different institutions, including a Swiss financial institution and a subsidiary Hong Kong trust company. FDUSD recently launched on Binance.

First Digital completed a $20 million financing in May 2022, with participants including Nogle and Kenetic Capital. First Digital has raised a total of $25.15 million in three rounds of financing.

LightsLianGuairk

LightsLianGuairk is a payment company created by former Facebook crypto executive David Marcus, which is based on the Bitcoin Lightning Network and builds enterprise-level infrastructure. Bitcoin custodian bank Xapo Bank and the largest crypto asset platform in the Middle East and North Africa region, Rain, have integrated into the LightsLianGuairk ecosystem through the LightsLianGuairk Wallet SDK. In April of this year, LightsLianGuairk announced the launch of the first enterprise-level entry platform for the Lightning Network.

LightsLianGuairk completed an undisclosed financing round led by a16z and LianGuairadigm in May 2022, with participation from Matrix LianGuairtners and Thrive Capital, among others. According to insiders from The Block, this round of financing raised $173 million at a valuation of $1 billion.

On-chain Government Bonds

Bringing real-world assets, starting with U.S. government bonds, onto the blockchain. RWA is one of the hottest topics in the crypto space this year, and MakeDAO is the biggest beneficiary. Tokenized government bonds offer higher returns and lower risks compared to some DeFi protocols.

Ondo Finance

Ondo Finance has the second-largest market share in tokenized assets, second only to Franklin Templeton. Currently, Ondo Finance offers four RWA products, providing investors with a range of cash management products and bond funds, including Short-Term U.S. Government Bond (OUSG) and the upcoming Tokenized Money Market Fund (OMMF), with OUSG TVL reaching $160 million and offering a 5.13% APY.

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

Maple Finance

Maple Finance was originally an uncollateralized lending protocol on the Ethereum blockchain, but it suffered a heavy blow due to the default of its important client, Alameda. In April of this year, Maple launched cash management pools for USDC and USDT, primarily catering to the conservative risk and daily liquidity needs of DAOs, offshore companies, and Web3 treasuries, supported by U.S. Treasury bills and reverse repurchase agreements. Currently, the Maple USDC and USDT cash management pools have approximately $21 million in deposits, offering 4.64% and 4.28% APY, respectively.

Maple Finance raised $1.4 million in financing led by Framework Ventures and Polychain Capital in March 2021, and raised $10.33 million through an IDO in May of the same year. In December of last year, due to the impact of the FTX default, crypto fund Orthogonal Trading defaulted on a $36 million loan from Maple Finance, accounting for 30% of active loans; Maple Finance expects to recover at least $2.5 million to reduce losses.

ZKP apps

Applications that use zero-knowledge proofs. Zero-knowledge proofs allow one party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that they know the secret value of a specific knowledge without revealing the value itself or providing any other information about it.

Ulvetanna

Ulvetanna provides fast, cost-effective, and concise zero-knowledge proof calculations. Its FPGA cluster is tailored for large-scale ZKP computations to support L1 and L2 blockchain protocols. Ulvetanna has assembled an interdisciplinary team covering applied cryptographers, software and hardware engineers, data center and cloud architects, and crypto-native investors, collectively designing the hardware and software stack from cryptographic algorithms to data center topologies.

Ulvetanna completed a $15 million seed round in December 2022, led by Bain Capital Crypto and LianGuairadigm, with participation from Jump Crypto.

Dark Forest

Dark Forest is the first full-chain MMORTS game built on Gnosis Chain and Ethereum using zk-SNARKs. It is launched by Argus Labs. Dark Forest has been active since its first test version was released on the Ethereum Ropsten testnet in August 2020, and it is the most popular and active application of ZKP in the gaming field.

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

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