Original author: defioasis, Wu Shuo Real

Original editor: Colin Wu

Note: This article is for information sharing only and does not endorse the mentioned projects or have any interests related to them.

Recently, Paradigm released a hero post, hoping to collaborate with excellent teams and talents in the cryptocurrency field to solve important business and research problems. Paradigm was founded in 2018 and raised $2.5 billion in venture capital in November 2021. As a research-oriented technology investment company, Paradigm has delivered many outstanding projects for the entire industry, with its investments in Uniswap, Lido, Blur, and others becoming pillars in their respective fields.

In the latest hero post, Paradigm stated that the important areas they are exploring include: protocol and infrastructure centered around "intent", Hooks built on Uniswap v4 (with a focus on LP profitability, losses, and rebalancing), multi-chain world infrastructure centered around Rollups, shared sorters, cross-chain games, native cryptocurrency social applications, prediction markets (creating liquidity markets with real liquidity), stablecoin payments/financial technology, on-chain national debts, and ZKP apps.

This article will take stock of the projects in the key areas of focus for Paradigm, including project progress, fundraising, on-chain data, social attention, and other dimensions.

Protocol and Infrastructure Centered Around "Intent"

In the past, developers designed and developed protocols that meet certain specifications or standards, which have clear requirements in terms of functionality, performance, and security. However, they often overlook the actual needs and intended use of end users. Designing protocols and infrastructure centered around "intent" means starting from the user's perspective, using the user's goals or intentions as guidance, to design protocols and infrastructure that provide a better user experience and match user needs.

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 primitives (fundamental components or operations that make up a system or program), enabling existing Web 2.5 dApps to achieve full decentralization, such as Optimism and ZK rollups, DEXs, NFT marketplaces, or public goods platforms like Gitcoin. Additionally, Anoma's architecture is designed from the outset for applications involving an infinite number of users and infinite number of intents issued, making it easy to build new applications that could be tricky, limited, or impossible to build on existing protocol architectures. These new applications include real-time rollups, multi-party and multi-token exchanges, second-price sealed auctions, privacy-preserving DAOs, game B economic systems such as plural currencies, cooperative finance, and utopias.

Anoma Foundation completed its third round of financing led by CMCC Global in May this year, with participants including Delphi Digital and Electric Capital. Anoma Foundation completed two rounds of financing led by Polychain Capital in 2020 and 2021 respectively, 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 cryptocurrency developers. Its first product allows start-up teams to quickly launch product-level Rollups based on the OP Stack. Rollups for specific apps on Conduit are launched, maintained, and expanded by infrastructure architects, allowing start-up teams to focus on building products that users love. Conduit deployments come with a built-in block explorer, automatic RPC extension, addressing, and a transaction tracker developed by Paradigm researcher samczsun. Deployments run on the same technology as the Optimism mainnet and are protected by Ethereum.

Conduit completed a $7 million seed round of financing led by Paradigm in March this year, with participants including Robert Miller, Head of Product at MEV research organization Flashbots, and Ludwig Pettersson, former original designer at OpenAI.

Building Hooks on Uniswap v4

Hooks are one of the important updates of Uniswap v4 and enable customizable liquidity pools.

Panoptic

Panoptic is a permanent, oracle-free options protocol built on the Ethereum chain, which constructs options on top of Uniswap v3 liquidity pools. Providing liquidity to Uniswap v3 pools is similar to writing put options, and reversing the liquidity position creates theoretically bullish option returns. However, due to each Uniswap position being unique and non-exchangeable, the structure of implementing loans from LP positions cannot be realized. Panoptic utilizes the movement of liquidity among ecosystem participants while collecting commissions to facilitate transactions, thus creating option-like returns. When Panoptic owns Uniswap v3 pools, it can create an options market on that token pair using this method. Because Panoptic's options are built on LP tokens, pricing is path-dependent and does not rely on the Black-Scholes model with oracles, thus completely avoiding the need for oracles. After the announcement of Uniswap v4, Panoptic also emphasizes that Uniswap v4 will be an important part of its roadmap.

Panoptic 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 an untrusted automated market-making infrastructure protocol that can execute diversified algorithmic strategies on Uniswap v3. LPs can manage liquidity using Arrakis' smart contract insurance vaults, including Trustless Vaults, Managed Vaults operated by professional market makers, and Self Managed Vaults. Professional market makers can provide liquidity management for other LPs in exchange for a share of commission income. Currently, Arrakis Finance TVL is nearly $190 million. On July 21st, Arrakis held a brainstorming marathon event with Uniswap Foundation to discuss building and thinking about v4 hooks.

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

Infrastructure for a multi-chain world centered around Rollups

Supports Rollup expansion technology and multi-chain interaction of blockchain infrastructure.

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 previously stated that the best way to reduce hacker attacks is to leverage existing battle-tested infrastructure as much as possible and drive towards a future centered around Rollups. Connext uses existing Rollup Bridges as the track for message validation to achieve this.

Connext completed a $7.5 million funding round in June with a valuation of $250 million, bringing its total funding to $23.5 million. Investors include Coinbase Ventures, IOSG, Polygon Ventures, and Fenbushi Capital, among others.

AltLayer

AltLayer is a decentralized and elastic Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) protocol. AltLayer adopts a modular design throughout the stack, allowing end users to customize their Rollup choices based on their needs: preferred runtimes such as EVM and WASM, data availability layers like underlying L1, Celestia, settlement layers like Ethereum and Arbitrum One. In addition to modularity, AltLayer's core features include extensibility that scales with applications, multi-VM support, fraud proofs, decentralized sequencer, layered terminus, and codeless Rollup launches.

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

Shared Sequencer

The sorter is very important for some Rollup scaling solutions. The responsibility of the sorter is to collect user transactions and sort them in a predictable way. The order of the sorting will determine the processing order of the transactions on the chain, thereby affecting the execution and verification of the transactions.

Radius

Radius is a 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 an encrypted memory pool created by practical verifiable delay encryption (PVDE). Through PVDE, the decentralized sorting of transactions can be ensured, preventing centralized sorters from front-running, sandwiching, or censoring user transactions.

Radius completed a $1.7 million seed round led by Hashed in June this year, with participation from Crypto.com and others.

Astria

Astria's shared sorter is a middleware blockchain with its own decentralized sorter set, which can accept transactions from multiple Rollups. These transactions will be sorted into a single block and written into the underlying layer without being executed. Rollups can retrieve them from Astria immediately after block creation.

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

Blockchain Games

Games that run entirely on the blockchain.

Realms: Eternum

Eternum is a fully on-chain open-source strategy game that runs on StarkNet and records state changes 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 that will be enforced by smart contracts, but these rules can also be changed through community voting.

Realms completed a $625,000 community private sale in February this year, exceeding its target by 6.35x.

Parallel: Colony

Parallel Colony is an AI-driven simulation strategy game where all simulation projects run on the blockchain. Avatars will be deployed to mining colonies for exploration. Each avatar in the game is an ERC-6551 wallet, which means avatars can own their own digital assets (ERC-20 and ERC-1155) and can trade with other AI avatars. In addition, not only can users give commands to avatars, but the game also allows AI 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 and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.

Native Crypto Social App

In the design and implementation, social apps that fully consider the characteristics of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Jambo

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

Jambo raised a Series A funding of $30 million led by Paradigm in May 2022, with investors including ParaFi Capital, Pantera Capital, Delphi Ventures, 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 chain and 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 monetization while ensuring the preservation of user-owned content and social relationships.

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

Prediction Market

A prediction market is a market that aggregates public predictions, ranging from weather conditions to election results and other things. It is worth noting that this track has received little attention before and the project's development has been relatively limited, making it the most niche area of interest for Paradigm.

Polymarket

Polymarket claims to be the largest decentralized encrypted prediction market, covering domains such as politics, sports, encryption, culture, and economics. A user named Severe - Watch with the address 0x64...6f1f has earned over $910,000 in revenue through predictions, making them the highest-earning user on the Polymarket platform. Another user named Slava - Ukraini with the address 0x9d...1344 has contributed the highest trading volume on the platform, exceeding $1 million, with profits of about $19,000. The Polymarket data panel shows a monthly activity of around 1,000 people.

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

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist is a prediction market built on Polkadot, supported by Web3 Foundation and ConsenSys alumni. Similar to Polymarket, it provides predictions covering politics, encryption, technology, science, news, sports, esports, and other fields. However, what makes it different is that Zeitgeist also offers some fun predictions about the Polkadot ecosystem, such as ones related to Dotsama and the platform itself, Zeitgeist. Additionally, Zeitgeist offers a greater variety of assets for prediction and supports betting with DOT.

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

Stablecoin Payment/FinTech

FDUSD

FDUSD is a programmable USD stablecoin issued by Hong Kong company FD 121 Limited (First Digital Labs). FDUSD is audited by Prescient Assurance and contract audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. However, the cooperating bank has not been disclosed. The associated party of FDUSD's reserve account is a publicly registered trust company in Hong Kong, which acts as a custodian. The custodian has deposited the USD holdings of the company into different accounts of different institutions, including a Swiss financial institution and a subsidiary Hong Kong trust company. FDUSD has recently been listed on Binance.

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

Lightspark

Lightspark is a payment company created by former Facebook Cryptocurrency Head David Marcus, which is built on the Bitcoin Lightning Network to construct enterprise-level infrastructure. Bitcoin custody bank Xapo Bank and the largest cryptocurrency asset platform in the Middle East and North Africa, Rain, have integrated into the Lightspark ecosystem through the Lightspark Wallet SDK. In April of this year, Lightspark announced the launch of the first enterprise gateway platform for the Lightning Network.

Lightspark completed an undisclosed financing round led by a16z and Paradigm in May 2022, with participating investors including Matrix Partners and Thrive Capital. According to sources familiar with the matter, this funding round raised $173 million at a valuation of $1 billion.

On-chain Government Bonds

Bring real assets, led by US Treasury bonds, onto the chain. RWA is one of the hottest fields in the crypto industry this year, and MakerDAO is the biggest beneficiary. Compared to some DeFi protocols, tokenized government bonds offer higher yields and lower risks.

Ondo Finance

Ondo Finance has the second largest market share of tokenized assets after Franklin Templeton. At present, Ondo Finance has a total of 4 RWA products, providing investors with a range of cash management products and bond funds, including short-term US Treasury bonds (OUSG) and soon-to-be-launched tokenized money market funds (OMMF), with OUSG TVL reaching $160 million, offering 5.13% APY.

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

Maple Finance

Maple Finance was originally an uncollateralized lending protocol on the Ethereum chain, but suffered heavy losses due to the default of its important client, Alameda. In April of this year, Maple launched cash management pools for USDC and USDT, primarily providing conservative risk and daily liquidity for DAOs, offshore companies, and Web3 treasuries, supported by US short-term Treasury bills and 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 funding 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, Maple Finance was affected by the collapse of FTX, and crypto fund Orthogonal Trading defaulted on a $36 million loan, which accounted for 30% of active loans. Maple Finance expects to recover at least $2.5 million to minimize 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 statement without revealing the value or providing any other information about it.

Ulvetanna

Ulvetanna provides fast, cost-effective, and concise zero-knowledge proof computations, operating on an FPGA cluster tailored for large-scale ZKP computations, with the goal of supporting L1 and L2 blockchain protocols. Ulvetanna has assembled an interdisciplinary team including applied cryptographers, software and hardware engineers, data center and cloud architects, and native crypto investors, working together to design hardware and software stacks from cryptographic algorithms to data center topologies.

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

Dark Forest

Dark Forest is the first fully decentralized MMORTS game built on Gnosis Chain and Ethereum using zk-SNARKs, launched by Argus Labs. Dark Forest has been active since its first test version on the Ethereum Ropsten testnet in August 2020 and is currently one of the most popular and active applications of ZKP in the gaming industry.

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

Reference Links:

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/