DraperU x Neo | Web3 Startups Showcase

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Tonight.

Tonight. Money, money, money, yeah. Money, yeah. Money, yeah. Money, yeah.

Hello, hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening depending on where you're joining us from. And we just saw in the chat that Some of you are joining us from SF all the way in US West Coast, and some of you are joining us from Turkey. We are now live. I want to welcome our panelists on stage. Asra, good to see you. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me. This is awesome. I'm excited.

And Matt. Matt, thank you for joining us.

Yeah, good to see you. Happy to be here.

So today's Demo Day, for today's Demo Day, we have partnered up with NEO and we're going to bring you the top 5 startups from a program we recently did with NEO blockchain. This is not our first Demo Day. If you're a follower of Draper University on stocks, you've been seeing us doing Demo Days throughout the year. And we are again here with the top 5 companies in Web3 building on NEO. My name is Safyan. I am the head of programs at Draper University. If you are a pre-seed, seed startup looking for a non-dilutive program, please hit me up. With that, Asra, over to you to tell us more about what we're doing at Draper University and more about DraperU Ventures.

Awesome. Thank you so much everyone for joining us. My name is Asra. I am the CEO of Draper University and I am also a partner at Draper University Ventures. So at Draper University, we believe that founders are superheroes and founders are people who are changing the world and building products that are going to have a huge impact. And we want to be a part of their journey as early as possible from when they start thinking about entrepreneurship. We have multiple programs that we run both online and in person to more specific accelerator programs that we do with our partners such as Neo. And you can kind of fit in into any of these multiple programs that we're doing and, uh, not only get funding from our partners but also potentially other investors in the Draper ecosystem. So I think one of the biggest things that we do at Draper University is bring access to network, capital, and talent, um, all across the world. And with that, we're now celebrating our 10th year. We have over, um, 3,200 alumni in 103 countries, um, who've raised north of $900 million in the last 6 years. And one of the stats that we're the proudest of is that each of our alumni creates within the first year 5 to 7 new jobs in the market that they come from. So that's something that we're incredibly proud of. And we currently have in our first fund 3 unicorns, and we're looking forward to all of you to build the next one. And Thank you so much, Matt, for doing this with us. Matt works at Draper Associates, and I'll have Matt tell us more about himself and Draper Associates.

Sure.

Thanks, Astra. Yes, so we're all on the same team, so similar ethos here. You know, we view entrepreneurs as modern-day superheroes because we're very confident that entrepreneurship is how freedom gets protected and grown around the world, and that's sort of our definition of superhero. And so the DraperU team sort of summarized how we think about the world. And Draper Associates is an institutional venture firm. And so we're just downstream basically from Draper University. So when you're ready to scale and raise kind of institutional size dollars, then you just come on over to us. We're literally right upstairs. So happy to be here.

Matt and Asra, thank you so much for taking out the time. This is going to be a fun-packed 1 hour or so. So to share more on the format, we're going to have 3 minutes of pitch time and 5 minutes of Q&A from both of you. And our first pitch for— oh, so I know you've done this a few times now, but just for the audience. So when the founder comes on, Astra and Matt will drop back and I will dissolve back into the StreamYard backstage. And when time is running out, um, for the founders, you will see us pop back up. So when you see the panelists pop back up, that means it's 10 seconds remaining and time is almost up. Um, so that's the format, and I'm looking forward to a fun-packed next hour. Um, okay, for the first pitch of the day, we have Robin Green joining us. Um, Robin, good to see you. Um, look forward to learning more about Greenfinch. Over to you.

Brilliant, thanks Safyan. Just waiting for the deck to pop up. Okay, excellent. Hi everyone, my name is Robin. I'm co-founder of Greenfinch. We developed a decentralized version of Dropbox built on the NEO blockchain and utilizing NeoFS. Decentralized storage platform. It's currently a proof of concept on the NEO N3 testnet, and with it we won the infrastructure category in this year's NEO Polaris Launchpad. From this initial work, we uncovered a number of potential revenue-generating verticals that we'd like to explore next. They include location-based storage and access, pay-per-megabyte content consumption, and decentralized hosting of web-based content. The vertical we plan to explore first is pay-per-megabyte content consumption. We've highlighted 2 key problems to solve. Number one is the centralization and control of well-known incumbent brands like YouTube and Vimeo. Number 2, it's currently not all Web3 infrastructure is truly decentralized and still relies on traditional centralized technology stacks like AWS. Our solution: decentralized content marketplace. Content creator creates content, uploads their content to NeoFS, sets their price per megabyte. Content consumers send micropayments for each megabyte of content they would like to stream via state channel payments. Step 3: if the micropayment arrives and is accepted, the content is released. And step 4, content access stops as and when micropayments stop. We believe the technology is possible by applying a lean approach to development and testing, help us to innovate at speed. Why are we picking this vertical? Well, simply put, there's a large potential market. When you explore the educational channels, specifically on YouTube, you can see the potential audiences available, but the respected lack of money being made on each video Feels like there's an opportunity here to explore. And when you see that YouTube takes 45% of revenue generated, doesn't leave much for content creators. There's competition in both centralized and decentralized space, although it's not abundantly clear how well the decentralized options are operating, and content quality on some platforms is relatively low par. Greenfinch is currently a team of 2, myself I'm a designer, design coach, and front-end developer, and Alex is a cybersecurity expert and back-end developer. We're both experienced facilitators. To move forward, we need to start building a team. We need support as we turn our side project into a startup. The ask: we would like to raise $250,000 split between product development, then marketing, brand development, and business development. In summary, we are pre-seed and currently self-funding. We want to release Greenfinch on NEO N3 mainnet, build an initial customer base with our existing product, engage with that customer base to guide our product development, and research and develop the pay-per-megabyte model. It's early, but it's exciting. Thank you for your time. We welcome your questions. Alex should also be able to join us now. Hi, Alex.

Hey, Robin, very nicely done.

Thank you.

Hey guys, that was, that was great. So I guess we'll ask questions for a couple minutes.

That's the—

yeah, the, uh, so how do you think about, um, like what, what are in it for the centralized file storage? What do you view as like the fatal flaws of that? And do you view your— is your market just You're just going to take Dropbox's market, or are they different markets, or are there some are different or some are the same? How do you think about those things?

Uh, for me, for the exploring this idea, a lot of people interested in moving away from the centralized approach of Dropbox, of Google Drive, etc. We had someone message us the other day, they're looking for a decentralized version. I think it's gonna be relatively hard to just take Dropbox to market. There are many people who want to move into the space of having control of their files and not necessarily sitting them on, you know, centralized technology stacks. So for me, it's about exploring those that are interested in moving away from that traditional market. And also some of the work that we need to do is being able to move into the space where we can help people understand exactly what's going on behind the scenes. I've got a Dropbox account. If I put my files on there every month, if I stop paying Dropbox, then those files disappear essentially. So I think there's a market there for people who want to explore, move away, and have more control of their files. Alex, I'm not sure if you've got anything to add on that one.

Yeah, I'd just say we've spoken to a couple of people in different industries, one being the medical industry, one being the, um, uh, it was actually the computer game graphics industry. They have a lot of assets And those kind of file assets, they're big in size. They don't, they want them backed up. They're expensive to make, and they certainly don't wanna be using the Google Drives of the world. So their other option currently is to host, um, internally. Um, uh, because there's no platform that exists currently that you can say, I'm, I wanna use your platform, but I also want my data to be stored in California. That's not an option on current platforms. With what we're offering here, you could be using a decentralized platform, decentralized storage. But the nodes you're storing on could be specifically where you want them to be in the world.

Yeah.

Following whatever guidelines and legal, legal legislation that you want, uh, your data to be under. For me, that's actually the most powerful tool, uh, thing here is, um, this, this offers you to say, I would like my data in France, California, and Hong Kong and nowhere else, and it'd still be decentralized.

Got it.

Yeah.

So I was gonna ask who, who's like the, the first users you're gonna go out to? So it sounds like medical and computer graphics.

Yeah, and there's, there's, I think on the consumer side, it's people who care slightly more about their privacy, I think is the simple one.

Yeah.

And then I think just thinking about the Dropbox analog, and especially with the overlay of there already being some competitors in the space that are, I think are also decentralized just based on your chart. Like I think Dropbox had like a decent amount of virality when they, when they went, when they got into the market. I think because of the, I think because of how they gave like free storage if you shared it or something like that. What's your guys' plan, especially given the overlay of competition? At this point.

So, sorry, Robin, is that okay?

Yeah, you go, I can follow up.

Yeah, I was— I think from that perspective, I think the cards on the table moment is that this is an early— this is early, this is R&D really, to really work out what the monetization model perfectly looks like. Currently, our current product, I consider a little bit like the WinRAR of 1999, if you remember that. It was a piece of software that's been free for 25 years. It's their most basic product. Everyone used it, everyone knows what it was, and they sold into corporates and things like that off the back of it. For us being pre-seed, I think that's sort of the situation here. This is partly R&D. How far can we take this? What does all the monetization models that we can utilize look like? We are still exploring at the moment the way monetization can work in terms of Offering people, say, free storage to start with could be we just credit them. Um, it could be that we met— we, uh, so host the files ourselves. If you— if they use our servers, our decentralized nodes, we can offer those for free. It could be something like that.

Yeah.

At the moment though, I haven't thought too hard about, uh, growth hacking the situation yet and how that would work.

Sure, sure.

This is the crypto world. There's NFT.

And just to pick up on the point that that idea of some form of growth hack. We had, when we were first putting together Greenfinch, we thought about the idea of tagging files so that if you shared an image file that had been stored on Greenfinch, there was some way of indicating, maybe an overlay, maybe a watermark of some description, that it had been stored on Greenfinch and been shared via that platform. So definitely the, you know, Hotmail did a similar thing, you know, the ability to growth hack and market this so that people understand where the files are stored, I think, is a key part of our marketing plan.

Got it.

Supyan, you're on mute.

Thank you, Matt. Robin, Alex, thank you so much, um, for your pitch. Um, okay, for our next pitch, we have Vlad, Vlad, we— oh, there you are.

Okay, can you hear me? Can you— okay, everything moves nice.

All right, go break a leg.

Okay, so hey everyone, my name is Vlad. I'm the CEO of Blockchain Cuties Universe, and today I present you Wars of Cutieland, a Web3 strategy game with open world economy. It's an expansion to Blockchain Cuties. Our mission is to create an economically sustainable Web3 game that retains its users with earning opportunities and ability to wage war against your opponents while fighting for your favorite blockchain. Current big problem in blockchain gaming is the long-term sustainability of game economies. First, many projects use inflation-based models which result in short product lifetimes. Second, few in-game economies are designed to be sustainable from the ground up, which result in massive player churn soon after the release. And third, it's extremely hard to recover if your game economy got inflated. So our solution to that problem is a bug-free strategy game that is built around control pool based economy, able to funnel users from our original game and improve its economy by tapping into the original game demand chain. The Wars of Cutieland would allow players to fight armies of NFTs against armies of NFTs, and it's going to be available everywhere on desktop, mobile, and web because it's built on Unity. The market, uh, traditional gaming, blockchain gaming, and metaverse markets all showing healthy growth rates despite global bearish macroeconomic trends, which is exactly what we need. So why join us now? Well, sustainable utility of Web3 games have already been proven by the likes of Splinterlands and Axies. Then market moves in cycles. Each next bull run massively increases adoption, and current bear market is the best time to build and prepare for the 1Kx growth rate, uh, that lies ahead. And finally, our team has 5 years of non-stop experience in GameFi space, and our project is already 65% complete. So what do we have? We have a capable team mostly located in Latvia, flagship product Blockchain Cuties that has almost, uh, 400K of registered users, 500 180K of NFTs minted across 7 different blockchains and strong communities, great partnerships, and good media coverage. The product that we offer is a sandbox-type game with user-generated content where everything is run by a pool-based economy system with each pool having controlled depletion and recovery rates. Game has order book-based marketplaces for both fungible and non-fungible assets, and we offer earning opportunities only in skill or, or investment-based mechanics that are extremely hard to bot. Guaranteed product value growth over time as all historical events are written to blockchain and stored in lands NFTs. And finally, asset interoperability with blockchain cuties for increased economical and stability of the product. So revenue streams, we have 2 of them. First one is game as a service where we take from 4% to 100% fees depending on the transaction type. And second one is token capitalization stream where we increase the asset value on hands by utilizing burn and buyback mechanics. And we'll also be doing cash flow generating cash flow through OTC deals. We have a team of 17 talented and battle-tested people. We are capable of doing everything in-house, and we have a proven track record in the relevant fields. We have ambitions and expertise to create the most sustainable Web3 game economy in the world, and we're planning to do that. For that, we're asking $3 million in seed round with SAFE and token warrant side letter. And with that amount of money, we plan to deliver a full game release by the end of Q2 '24, and coupled with $10K users to kickstart the launch. So, um, in general, this is how the in-depth game mechanics looks like. We have 8 core loops that are able to drive value within the game. Right now the game is in pre-alpha stage, but most mechanics are already functional. Uh, we choose a low-poly art style because it ages well, and most blockchains are added as playable factions, each having setting, uh, timeline, and lore, and majority already are implemented in the game. So the project sports 16 million land tiles. It's a 4K by 4K map, and each tile is an NFT and can store historical events as metadata. We have a roadmap, we have a weighted readiness map, and if you would like to understand how our architecture works, you can check the last 3 slides. I think that's it. Thank you for your attention.

Astra, you can go first this time. You're on mute. All right, I'm the mute police today.

I know you are. We should have figured this mute thing out by now, but clearly we haven't. Vlad, thank you so much for doing this. I absolutely love, um, how cute all of these characters are. Um, so help me better understand, um, your team, uh, like, uh, kind of, you know, what the current team size is and what, um, and then also kind of how you guys are expanding with this fundraise. Is it just, um, because the land sale seems like a low-hanging fruit, when is that happening? And like, how does the fundraise plus the NFT sales kind of fit into, um, the broader, um, next 6-month plan?

Okay, so right now we have 3 dedicated people working on Wars of Qudaland and 1 guy who is jumping from Blockchain Cuties to Wars of Qudaland. He mainly does the blockchain stuff. So our plan is to hire and expand the team to at least 12 dedicated people who would work on graphics, on backend polishing, and especially we have UI issues right now, so we need to dive deeper into that.

And how many hours of gameplay are you guys launching with the 3 people that you currently have?

How many what?

Game?

How many hours of gameplay is that?

It's going to be hundreds of hours because the game is already playable as a user-generated content. So you create cities, you create armies, you take over other players' cities, you go through the ages, expand them, and the content is always popping up on the global map and everything can be taken away. The map can change. There are personal politics, clan politics, and faction politics. And when the game is going to be released, you as a player can become a king of a faction and influence how the faction evolves, what are the economic benefits that are going to be presented during your rule, and so on. So everything right now is already like laid out. We have a 72-page white paper. It's not ready yet, it's going to be like 100-something, uh, but, uh, we're finalizing it and by the end of this year, uh, the whole vision is going to be laid out and people will be able to acknowledge themselves with it.

Okay, um, I— so help me understand what the launch plan looks like. Is it more you're going to do NFTs for the clans with each of these chains, or then the land sale comes in and then you kind of start releasing more gameplay? Or is the game kind of being released and then the NFTs are just like rolled into it as a part of the release process?

Um, it's going to be differently. Um, so we already have a lot of NFTs in Blockchain Cuties. Those NFTs can be locked, uh, within Blockchain Cuties, transferred to Wars of Cutieland, and you will be able to compose armies out of them as you progress progress through the ages, you will be able to put different items and make those, uh, like soldiers fight better, uh, define different army compositions. Then, uh, additionally, the whole map is going to be like a land sale, uh, but those NFTs, uh, will be like— there are going to be 2 layers of ownership. One, the real ownership. If you own the land that you conquered, it will produce like, uh, more to you, more benefits. But if you don't own, then, um, it will still produce benefits.

Uh, okay.

Some, some of the lands are already sold, but the majority of the, uh, lands will be sold when the game is released because, uh, you will have to conquer the land first, and then you'll be able to buy it like from us. And then, uh, if it's like, uh, under your management right now, somebody else conquers the land, then he can offer you an order to buy the land if he wants to receive more benefits. And there's going to be a second type of metagame here because some people will be able to economically block the advancement of other factions by not selling them the land. So there's going to be a lot of different types of metas, both political, player-based trading within the game, and all of that will create new and new content for players to dive deeper. And enjoy.

Okay, awesome.

Matt, do we have time?

We'll take one last question.

Cool.

I guess it's sort of one question and two. I'm not super familiar with the Web3 gaming world, so these may be dumb questions, but how do you break through the noise in the gaming world? I think part of it may be you already have some users from a different— from the And then, and then like once you break through the noise, like, is there— like, how big is the biggest blockchain gaming company at this point? Like, is there, is there a playbook? Is there like a—

Well, the playbook is still being like tested and researched. The biggest one was like Axie Infinity last summer. They turned around $2.4 billion during 2 months, I believe. So it's pretty big at the moment. There's like more than 1.2 million people playing the games on different chains, and they're easily switchable. And right now we're like in a bear market, so it's pretty bad. So during the next bull cycle, this will expand like 5 times, 10 times, maybe more. So how will we get through the noise? I already like— we have Blockchain Cuties game, it's well known. It's the OG. We released it in 2018 and we will funnel users through Blockchain Cuties. Yeah. So this is how we plan to do it.

That's a good strategy. Awesome.

Thank you, Vlad. Okay. Next up, we have Sergey.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello. Great.

Great.

You're ready to go. All right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm ready. Yeah, uh, so hi, my name is Sech and I'm going to tell how we at Sunday Games are reinventing one of the most popular video game genres. First, let's set the context. What do you know about gaming market? It's huge and there is always a space for a new project. To meet the market, the game must be expensive and/or unique. The second way suits a new studio better. So in 2017, I paid attention to the first implementation of the blockchain in games. After 4 years of work in this niche, our team has found a right approach and it's scaling up now. 2, it's too early for metaverses in form described by the science fiction. The hardware is not ready and the audience doesn't see any valuable use cases of it. But now is the right moment to create the next-gen MMORPG. It should give more opportunities to the creators and allow players to enter complex social-economic relationships This is exactly the kind of project we have been working on for the last 2 years. In the first place, UP Nova is an MMORPG with a big world where players can mine resources, build colonies, upgrade characters and spaceships, complete quests, and play with friends. We multiply the time-proven gameplay by fully implementing the play-and-earn economy model. Also, the game will allow allow the creators to show their talent in a new level of freedom and make profit from it. In addition, the characters will gain a high level of autonomy, freeing the player from the routine. And all this will take place in a truly open world where characters can move seamlessly between space stations, starships, and planetary bases. The concept may sound too ambitious, but our team have enough experience and passion to bring it to Sunday Games is 20 professionals motivated to create amazing projects. Our head office is in Cyprus, but part of the team work remotely. Average experience in developing world-class projects is more than 10 years. Right now we're at the middle of the pathway. Before the project started, we have been experimenting in the blockchain game niche for 2 years. Our game Xerox Universe was most— was one of the most popular in In 2020, we fully focused on Supernova. At the beginning of 2021, we received the angel investment that allowed us to create a first demo by the end of the year. In the spring of 2022, we successfully raised funds in the token sale, which allowed us to scale the team. Our next, our next goal is to deliver a public multiplayer demo before the end of the year. The release is planned for next year. Um, so let's sum up. We create the unique and promising play-and-earn game. We have the experienced team and significant, and significant progress in development and community gathering. So we are looking for new partners who will help us to do even more. And if you want to share the project success with us, just contact me. Thank you for your attention.

Awesome, Serge. Really cool. Similar question to the last one. How do you break through the noise on something with something like this? Like, how do you let everybody know that you're the game to play and get everybody on there?

Yeah, so first of all, we're focusing on gameplay and we focus it on Web2 players and we use the same approach to acquire this audience. So the main approach is to use target ads from Twitter, Facebook, and so on. And we already have a great and successful experience in our previous Web3 games, so we are able to buy players from Facebook and, uh, move it to Google Play, and we earn more than we spend on user acquisition So the same approach we plan, uh, we plan to use in, in this game just to scale it and, uh, make a bigger game. And, uh, and we have a lot of users from, uh, from our previous game, uh, Xerox Juniors, and we already make a token sale and we acquire some audience. So for example, right now 20,000 people in Twitter and Telegram groups we already have. But our main point is to build a ROI-positive economy.

Sure.

And how many— so how many hours of gameplay do you have now, and how many do you think you need to kind of—

Uh, the question about hours of gameplay is, is relevant for, for premium, uh, monetization model. in games like free-to-play and, uh, play and earn, uh, it's, uh, it's endless games. And we, we try to build such a gameplay that players can, uh, play for, for years. So any MMORPG like World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and so on, they live for, uh, 10 years, 20 years, and on. So, and, um, we're not focusing like a lot of content and a lot of storytelling, and, uh, but we focusing on sandbox, uh, survival. So, so player can, uh, build your own story and your own experience in our world.

Very cool. Astrid, you got anything?

Um, so the reason games like World of Warcraft of like, you know, kind of go on for like 20+ years is because of the story-driven gameplay and the strong community that people build within the game, right? So help me understand what you're saying because you're saying that's not important to build longevity in what you guys are doing. And if that's the case, how does it work then?

I'm not saying this. I'm saying that it's usually There are 2 approaches. So, uh, team can focus on, uh, on content, on story, on some, uh, some storytelling, and it's one kind of game. And other kind of game, uh, trying to build the systems, the gameplay, the sandbox for players. And, uh, we, we try to build such tools and such instruments that players can use and build his own story. And one of our pillars is, so we're focusing on creators and we will have a system that will motivate them to build stories and content in our game. And of course, we are able to import NFTs and and content from other games and from brands, for example. So right now our characters can wear, for example, some Adidas and other brands. And around this, some content can be important in our game. So there are 2 approaches, story-focused and sandbox-focused. And is There are a lot of games that find their success in the second way.

Awesome.

Thank you. I'm so fans here.

Thank you, Sergey.

Thank you.

We're out of time. But great pitch. All right. Next up, we have Michael.

Hello.

Hi.

Over to you.

Hi.

Okay, so hi everyone. I'm Michael and I'm the founder of Rentfuse. Rentfuse is a protocol to lend and rent NFTs on the blockchain. Current renting markets account for around $3 trillion, but if you consider a 5% conversion to the blockchain technology, we are sitting on a $150 billion opportunity. But why renting an NFT? Well, basically for all the perks that renting an asset will give you, but on steroids due to the fact that you are renting a digital asset. So we built RentUse protocol layer as a marketplace for users to lend and rent NFTs and the layer for developers to easily integrate the renting functionality in their application. Our protocol features 2 categories of renting. We have collateralized renting that need collateral and direct NFT transfer, and non-collateralized ones when there are no collateral and no ownership change. Our revenue model is based on a fee, a dynamic fee that is applied to each renting operation and goes straight to the RentFuse treasury. We feature also a native token that is a limited supply utility token that can be used to earn awards, vote proposals, rent NFTs, or incentivizing the usage of the protocol. We have some competitors, but we achieve higher composability and integrability, and we are the only one on the NEO blockchain. Looking back to our achievement, we achieved a lot during the last year. We first won the NEO Hackathon as best NFT project, and then we joined the NEO Hurry Adoption Program. Then through the year, we further developed the protocol We launched also some developer tools, and we finally launched RentUs on NEO mainnet during this June. For the future, we want to achieve a lot more. So at first, we want to improve the protocol by adding new functionalities like subscriptions, and then we want to scale to other chains. In order to do so, we are fundraising $1 million that will be mainly used for development So join the revolution, and thank you for your attention.

Asra, why don't you lead it off this time?

Oh, go ahead.

Okay, um, talk a little bit more about competition, um, and specifically, I don't, I don't, I don't, um, what is the composability element there?

Yeah, well, um, we built a technological solution that allow developers to easily integrate renting functionality in their applications. So basically, uh, we have these 2, uh, type of rentings. The first one are collateralized ones that are kind of escrow, a simple escrow renting where there is an NFT transfer between the parties and we are kind of the middleman. But then we have the more interesting one that are non-collateralized rentings where basically we create a wrapper for the NFT. So it's a kind of a shadow NFT, a placeholder that goes around while the real NFTs stay safe in a vault in our protocol contract so that the borrower can use the NFT in compliant application while the lender has his NFT safe in his vault. So, and this solution is— and our protocol is built in a way that we easy-to-use API for developers so that this is the composability. We already have a project, so some developers that are building a DeFi solution upon RentUs, they will launch next year on NEO, and they are building so these futures trading DeFi protocol that is based on the renting functionalities of RentUs.

So these.

And it was the composability. And then what was the other axis?

Integrability.

Yeah. So yeah, it's kind of seen and how many, just essentially how many compositions you have that easily integrate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And mainly integrated, how easy is to integrate it in your application.

So in our case, it's kind of really Yeah, and my understanding is that most of the demand for renting NFTs is for gaming. Is that what you're going for?

Well, at the moment, yes, for sure. But because the blockchain space is mainly populated by play-to-earn games, so we are targeting utility NFTs. So at the moment is like this, but we— and our mission is to bring the renting economy to the blockchain. So we are not just focusing on what is now on the blockchain, but we are also looking forward to the future. So looking to the future, we have to consider also that now we have Web2, then we will have Web3, but there won't be Web3 without Web 2.5. So there will be more and more companies that will build also real-life items.

Yeah.

Like an example is Airbnb or Uber or Everything can be used as NFTs, and so you can rent them. And we want to be to the forefront of these, uh, of these usages.

Is that what you see as like kind of the next big markets? Gaming and then Airbnb and Uber type, like kind of real-life platforms? That's what you see coming next?

Yeah, also the real estate market would be really interesting. So tokenization platform that can tokenize or convert to NFTs real-life solutions. And in my opinion, that would be the most awesome use case and the one that will bring more and more people to the blockchain. So they will use that without knowing that under the curtains there is something that is on the blockchain. So in my opinion, this is the— this would be the best thing.

Awesome.

Cool.

No, there we go. Good timing.

Thank you, Michael.

Thank you.

Great job. Okay, so for our last pitch of the day, we have Annie from Calamus Finance. Annie, I know it's super late night for you. Thank you so much for doing this.

That is welcome. I've been waiting for this for a long time, so.

All right.

So hello everyone, I'm Annie from Talents Finance, and let's start. So blockchain is a vibrant and bustling market. Changes happen every second and we need time to keep up with them. But instead, we're wasting time and money on admin work every month for recurring payments like token vesting and payroll. And that's just one of the many problems we're having with existing payment solutions. Besides lack of automation, they also have trust-related risks. Many crypto payment contracts are signed out of trust, but trust, it's actually the most unreliable thing. And lastly, delay time. Employees and investors have to wait for a specific date to receive the payment. Thus, to solve those issues, a decentralized crypto streaming protocol is born. Calamus Finance aims to promote transparent and secure streams of money. Crypto streaming is simple. You create a stream for as long as you want and only pay gas fee for one transaction. Money can be streamed per minute, second, up to year, and all transactions are recorded on-chain. You can use Calamus Finance for auto payroll, token vesting, and multisig wallet. It offers a no-code solution for teams' financing and treasury management. We take only 0.24% of the payment amount as service fee. Thus, we're sitting on at least a $50 billion opportunity, and Kalos Finance will grow as the blockchain industry grows because it deals with the most fundamental use cases of crypto: pay and get paid. We're currently superior to our competitors in that we target both EVM and non-EVM-based chains. We support token vesting by letting users set a cliff date and initial release. Regular streams are also highly customizable, and users can top up their stream anytime. Our team has 6 core members. We are skilled in our own work, and we have experience of starting and scaling a business. We've been building software as a service for 4 years, and although we're still new to the blockchain world, we've got some achievements in some competitions and accelerators with a total prize received of nearly $100,000. And currently, we've got more than 10 projects joining our whitelist to become early users. Calamus Finance will be on mainnet this December, and we will launch our token Calamus early next year. Alongside community engagement and function development activities, Calamus Finance will soon be the one-stop payment platform for blockchain projects. So join us now to pay and get paid every second. Thank you very much.

Awesome, thank you. Mark, can I quickly ask a question?

Go for it.

All right, so what's the first use case that is the Yes.

So for money streaming platforms, I've seen from talking with our partners, the most potential use cases is token vesting, because currently without us, projects have to build their own system for token vesting, which costs a lot of resources and also time. So we offer them with a no-code solution. So it's very convenient. It's very user-friendly and people who are not familiar with blockchain can easily interact with the app. Yeah. And it's also secure and it's like a trustless escrow between the project and the investors. Yeah. So it's one of our potential use cases.

Awesome. So when you said you have a project that is using Calamus, That's what they're using it for, vesting, essentially.

Yeah. Well, we have sort of like more than 10 partners right now, and each of them is different. We've got some people who are trying to do with token vesting, and some existing projects who already launched their token want to use Calamus Finance for airdropping. And we also have DAO platforms. Who are trying to integrate Calamus Finance to their ecosystem. So people from their project could also easily use Calamus Finance. So yeah, it's a diverse landscape.

Okay, Matt. Awesome. So token vesting will one day be a huge market, but today I would imagine is not that big of a market. Behind, like, what are other big markets you think you could go to?

Hmm, well, in terms of these questions, I think I would like to, like, highlight the current players. So Cannabis Finance, like, not the first, not the first platform to do money streaming. So we've got some big players like Sapiere. Sapiere is currently having more than $200 million in TVL, and at its peak It's $1.57 billion in TVL, and most of them comes from token vesting. So yeah, I would say that token vesting—

Yeah, cool.

Yeah, so I would say that token vesting seems to be like a niche market, but it's actually generating a lot of revenue. And also, it's very potential because for early-stage projects, when they launch it, token, usually they haven't got that much resources and finance to do all that kind of stuff. So that's where we jump in and like we seize the market gap and we become the platform for them to easily interact.

Yeah.

And definitely, because we take 0.25% of service fee on top of the stream amount, so it really depends on their token. And that kind of service fee Could like also scale, could also like go up because of the price of the token goes up.

Yeah, interesting. And then on using your platform for payroll, is that because the companies— I'm trying— is that because the companies you're servicing are like already blockchain companies and they just, they need a solution? Or is it because it's not a blockchain company and they just have employees all over the world and this is an easier way? To pay them and lower the fees, or is it both?

Or how do you think about that?

Well, yeah, I would say currently most of the projects who are aiming to pay in crypto are already blockchain projects. So they usually pay in stablecoins and also the token of their own ecosystem. Yeah. So it's also a way to pay the employees and a way to reward them as well. And especially Like, we're working on a global industry, so everyone is anywhere out in this world. So yeah, we've got a lot of cases like hiring a freelancer for the project for a part-time job. So in that case, it's kind of very difficult to sign a legal contract. So that kind of contracts are usually signed out of So the freelancer is really dependent on the hire to pay them on time. But with Calamus Finance, like, we ensure that people get the money as soon as they work on, and they could receive for every hour, for every second that they work. So it's fair for both parties.

Yep.

And you mentioned, I guess, the one— there's one big company in the space that you mentioned earlier. Are there a lot of players?

Well, in terms of big players, we've got Stapler in the EVM-based landscape, and also in Solana, we've got Streamflow. Streamflow currently have more than $500 million in TVL, and many of them comes from token vesting as well.

Yeah.

So for non-EVM-based chains, we've got like chains, the opportunity is very large. So yeah, we decided to focus on both EVM and non-EVM. Of course, it requires more time and effort because they don't have the same technology. But we already have skills in many competitions and building projects. So yeah, we're very confident of building Kalamos Finance on non-EVM-based chains.

Awesome.

Thank you, Annie. Unfortunately, time's up, but great job. It's a great pitch. And to all the founders who pitched today, thank you so much for taking out the time. I know you were in different time zones. Some of you stayed up late night to make this happen. Great job, guys. And now Nat and Asra, I'm gonna put a bit of a spotlight on you guys. So, Asra, who was your top pitch for today?

Actually, let's have Matt go first because he's our guest.

Live?

Yeah.

Oh my gosh. The— I liked all of them a lot.

The—

remind me, I didn't write down all the names, but I have notes on all of them. Remind me all the names.

So it's first one was Green Finch. The second one was Blockchain Cuties. The third one was Supernova. Fourth, RentFuse. Fifth, Fourth Galaxies Finance.

Problem.

So decentralized storage, uh, yeah, yeah, I remember them all.

Um, to me, Blockchain Cuties and Calamus Finance I think are probably my 2 favorites, and I'm gonna go with Blockchain Cuties, um, just because it seems like they have a good distribution strategy. They kind of have already— they have a good distribution strategy too, because to me as the non-expert in gaming, that one of the harder parts is just how do you let people know that you're there? And they seem to have a really good strategy there. And so I'm going to go with them.

Awesome. Asra, I know you come from the world of gaming, so it'll be cool.

No, I know Matt stole my— no, I absolutely love Blockchain Cuties just because I'm a huge fan of the block— like, the cuties itself. But from a business model, So I think games are— they're absolutely fabulous and it's a big market. They're also extremely tricky and we've invested in quite a few gaming companies. So definitely, but it's exciting nonetheless. But Calamus is something that I think, at least from talking to our founders who are in the crypto space, it's definitely a problem that is worth solving, and I absolutely think that there's something there that we can explore. Rentfuse and Greenfinch, where I think they're in that ideal space where it's just early and you need to kind of figure out what that initial business model is going to be before it like really takes off. So excited for them, um, to be able to do that. But I think Calamus would be my, um, top one to keep a watch out on, and I'll definitely play both the games actually.

All right, so Calamus is kind of the winner today. Um, Matt and Asra, thank you so much for joining us.

Um, great. Yeah, thank you. This is awesome.

We had 140 people tune in, so So any parting words, Matt and Astra?

Keep it up. Those were great.

I know. Keep building. And, um, whatever you're building, let us know. It's, um, basically our names at, um, draperuniversity.com. And Matt, um, is also available at Draper Associates. So happy to help. Just let us know whatever you're building. We go through All the pitches that we get, and that's how we meet new people. So please do reach out to us if you're building something exciting and world-changing.

Thank you so much everyone for tuning in, um, and thank you to the Stogs team for helping us set this up. Um, we will see you all soon on another Demo Day right here. Until next time.