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Aurora Blocks Partners Get Together
Recorded: May 22, 2025 Duration: 1:01:00Space Recording
Short Summary
The Aurora Blocks incubator program has officially launched, offering $150,000 in funding to support innovative projects on the NIR protocol. With strategic partnerships from CV Labs, Aleph Cloud, and others, the initiative aims to foster growth in the blockchain ecosystem, focusing on key trends such as AI integration and decentralized identity solutions.
Full Transcription
. Thank you. Hello, hello, everyone.
I see that everybody is joining.
Let's give it a few minutes so that everyone can be enabled to be a speaker.
Hello. Thank you. . All right, I think we should all be here and everyone should be able to speak from our partners. If not, just send an invite. But let's get started with just a quick introduction
to this space. As the title suggests, this is a get-together with our partners from Aurora Blocks.
It's our incubator program that we recently launched that is targeted to builders that have great ideas and are willing to launch their projects as virtual chains on NIR. 150K in the total funding pool for projects and mentorship from the partners that are here today.
Most of them are here.
Some of them were not able to participate, but we'll share some news to highlight.
All of them were very grateful for their participation to this program.
So before we get into the introduction to our partners, welcome to everyone, to all our listeners
and also in particular to our partners that were so kind to join us today to
talk about this program. We shall pass the mic on to Jäger, that is our ecosystem manager and has worked on this pro in this program for many weeks and was able to bring it
to you guys so i'll let you introduce aurora blocks with all the details go ahead yeah thank
you ariana thank you ariana for for kind intro and kicking off our first Twitter space.
And yeah, Igor here, I'm a system manager and apparently I put for today ahead of a program manager for this incubator.
It's pretty exciting to get it all together, to get everybody into one space because we had a number of calls with each and every partner separately,
but now everybody's there.
But let me make it quick because I know Giannis from CV Labs.
He and his team are hosting a pizza day in Sock, and I don't want him to eat cold pizza
slices bought by Bitcoin, actually.
So let me make it quick, brief intro into what we are cooking at Aurora
and in Aurora Blocks Incubator, to be more specific.
So in very essence, it's very simple.
Aurora Blocks is our first homemade,
fully online incubator program
that is targeting early stage, like seed or pre-seed projects, to
help them launch EVM compatible chains on top of NIR protocol. Basically, we are
helping founders keep the infra pain and go straight to building cool stuff towards 1,000 chains launched by 2025.
And this initiative was partly inspired by the journeys of what the Near Horizon team was accelerators, incubators, main accelerators that are like working as a machine gun for a cool project that are setting narrative
and defining the crypto space development
for a couple of months or years forward.
Much louder both.
And so, as I mentioned, during this program, we are going to onboard
five projects building in AI or DeFi vertical, RWA, DeFi, DePin, Bitcoin L2s, and BTC5. But again, if anybody is building something well outside these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5 verticals, feel free to apply on our website. We are happy to review, interview, and if everything is good, onboard you.
you what we're offering uh this is the sweetest parts um we are going to provide full stack
tech and go-to-market support mentorship from real deal industry leaders and you can meet
them right now during this space uh access to near and aurora wide ecosystem connections
different founder playbooks uh spreadsheet templates, resources,
obviously perks, exclusive perks from our partners. And the sweetest part is
funding, funding in the form of 50k up to 50k to Incubes, which is amazing, I would say.
in Qubis, which is amazing, I would say.
And brief intro about timelines.
So we started on May 14th.
We'll launch our application process
that will last until May 28th.
And after that, we will jump into the proper selection
and short listing candidates and onboarding them.
And so the shortlisted candidates will be announced around June 1st.
And the actual programming part will start on June 9th and will last until July 20th
and will last until July 20th and culminates in a demo day,
which is planned to be hosted on July 23rd.
And, yeah, that's a brief intro about Incubator.
Happy to continue our conversation, our space with you guys.
Ariana?
Thanks, Jagor, for the intro to the space.
Hopefully it provides a good grasp of what this is all about.
So now we can start with introducing our guests.
First in line, CB Labs, since you have somewhere to go,
somewhere exciting to go soon. And yeah, for this round of intros, you'll need a good
short-term memory because since it's a lot of us, we need to ask you a few questions right off the bat. I hope that's okay.
That will test your memory skills.
So, yeah, I'll leave the mic to CB Labs.
The question is, who are you?
What CB Labs does?
And also, what's your involvement with the aurora blocks program and um also what are what
is a good piece of advice for projects aiming to go to market in 2025 and a hot take on uh
what vertical excites you the most. It's a lot to remember.
Yes, just remind me in the end if I forgot something.
But yeah, first of all, thank you so much, Ariane and Igor,
for having me and also having us at CVVC and CVLabs being part of this.
So yeah, I'm Yanis from CVVC.
We are an early stage venture capital firm from Switzerland.
And what I do at CVVC, so I lead our acceleration efforts since around
four and a half years. Yeah, so the idea there is that we want to support early stage startups
with capital, but actually a bit more because we have a bit of a differentiator in terms of
other VCs because we have a sister brand, which is called CVLabs, which we call our ecosystem
builder. So started in 2016, headquartered out of ZOOC, Switzerland.
We host and build ecosystems across the globe.
So in our HQ in ZOOC, we have a co-working space with around 220 crypto firms.
And yeah, next to co-working in our ecosystem approach, we also do events like today,
where we have our, together with the Pizza DAO, our Bitcoin pizza party.
Or for instance, next week we do in Zurich a decentralized AI event and more and more.
But yeah, so we grew out of Zug and expanded globally.
We have now a team based in Cape Town where we have an Africa strategy, also a micro fund on the VC side of things.
But we also have team members and presences in Berlin, Lisbon, London and Liechtenstein.
And recently this year, we also, or actually end of last year, we announced a partnership
with DMCC to also be more active in the Middle East, specifically Dubai.
Now, coming back to the investment side of things, we invest since 2018 and we backed
around 75 startups to date.
So from our thesis perspective, we invest
early stage, so from pre-seed to series A. But also from Artizis perspective, we are ecosystem
and vertical agnostic. So for us, it's always just important that we meet great founders with
great ideas and the rest is then secondary, I would say. So what I think is also worth noting is that from our investment,
total number of investments, the majority is also through our acceleration program.
So 55 out of the 75 deals we did.
And we do this program once or twice a year.
And maybe to sum it up in a sentence or two,
so what you really focus on in this acceleration program
is to help founders with two things
which is on the one hand the entire go-to-market approach
so this is a very big topic
from all the PR, branding, media to product and whatnot
whereas on the other hand the second big pillar
that we want projects to be when we graduate
is the investor readiness.
And this also guides me now to how we will be part of our blog.
So we will support the participating projects with this investor readiness structure that we created.
So usually we say this includes things such as having a fundraising goal, cap table, data room, different types of pitches, and much more.
So the goal is that projects after these modules and with us as a mentor on the side, they have everything they need to start properly fundraising.
And yeah, they just create a beautiful narrative together with them and help them to,
to draft a strategy to get,
to get their word out and potentially also then race.
So yeah,
we're very excited to be part of this and now remind me again,
I think I forgot the last two questions that you asked what,
what that was about.
You did a great job remembering everything,
but one,
which is the vertical that you're most excited about
all right that's a very good question so um personally for me it's always um like what
excites me the most is generally abstraction so this goes from from chain abstraction to account
abstraction and whatnot so i think personally you know when we want to achieve mass adoption and we want to really tap into more user bases,
we need to find a way that users interact on chain
without having to deal with all the complications
that we probably, we're getting better,
but we still to date have a lot of them.
So that's usually what I like to see.
But I think coming back again to our thesis,
I think we are not an investor that
that is doing deep infra but that doesn't mean that that's not exciting but just from a thesis
perspective we look a bit more on the application or this middle layer that enables application
so yeah I guess that makes sense great thank you very much for for the intro that's uh very exciting uh to have you on this
program so let's go next uh to another partner who would like to speak next don't be shy just go ahead
Don't be shy.
Just go ahead.
Let me pick someone.
Hope nobody will be against.
Oh, I see Aleph Cloud.
Clement, go on.
Yeah, thank you.
So yeah, my name is Clement.
I'm the head of marketing for Aleph Cloud.
And we are a cloud provider, as it's in the name.
So basically what we do at Aleph, we provide a fully decentralized cloud
network that relies on nodes that can be operated from all over the world by
basically anyone, whether they are like enterprises, um, traditional institutions, um,
retails, anyone, me, you, whatever.
Um, what I do for Aleph, uh, is obviously, uh, trying to get, uh, the
attention of, uh, developers mostly because, mostly because we need people to build new application on a decentralized cloud.
But also, we are also, I'm sorry, I'm also looking for projects that already use centralized cloud and try a new alternative, which is censorship resistant.
We don't milk any data.
We don't have access to any data, et cetera, et cetera.
So basically I'm trying to onboard more and more users, and it makes completely sense
for us to partner with Aurora for that, as they are providing this incubator to developers, to builders.
We are here to provide the full start, the full infrastructure to those builders.
And I think it's a good way to start in this ecosystem to have free cloud access, to have
also access to everything that the other partners provide
this is something that is really important to start with um so what we are offering as i said
uh it's like on one hand the technical uh advices uh how build, but it's really simple to use this kind of cloud.
This is an infrastructure with a very friendly UI and UX, but we are here to help build, develop, push to production, but also providing all the components.
And it can be from web hosting to GPU, to, um, VPS, confidential, virtual machines,
access to AI, um, infrastructure as well.
Uh, and on chain tools.
Um, I think I'm done for this part this part uh the next one will be like the vertical
if i'm correct um i'm i'm a simple man uh i'm most excited by defy since device summer to be honest
this is um it's really amazing what we can do with Internet Magic Money.
And I'm still very excited for what's happening right now, but also for the future.
Awesome. Yeah, I agree with you, DeFi.
It's getting interesting.
There is definitely a revival with AI as well
and the merge of those two.
So interesting times for this space.
Just one question,
one question that as part of the presentation,
what would you advise projects
that are aiming to go to market?
What would you say to them?
Well, from a marketing point of view,
not really technical,
but keep away from the noise.
Just log out from Twitter
and all kinds of social social media build yourself uh
focus on what you are building and most importantly build something that is needed that people really
need otherwise everything else is like pure uh uh i mean not really important that doesn't really matter. Okay, thanks.
That's definitely an interesting advice to hear.
Log out of Twitter.
That's usually what everybody is trying to do,
to be cool on Twitter.
So, yeah, interesting take.
And we have someone that would like to speak next. Goor Abhim. The floor is yours.
Thank you. Hi, everyone. I am Director of Growth at Billions Network. Billions Network is the
global human and AI network. It's the first decentralized identity the global human and AI network it's the first decentralized identity
layer for human and AI agent super happy to be part of the Aurora Docs partnership space today
and you know excited to see the way you are trying to uh grow the ecosystem and this kind of an
incubation program is certainly very very interesting for various uh builders uh what
we bring to the table is uh primarily the capability in terms of bringing in this
decentralized identity layer and i'm sure that many projects within the aurora ecosystems whether
it is d5 gaming nft rwa deep in i think identity becomes an important component, either first of all for the user
onboarding or maybe providing different interesting services to those users.
And nowadays, when we are talking about user, we are having both human users and agent as users.
And I think this is where our identity solutions can help in terms of getting the identity and the compliance layer
added for both segments. We have established a solution that can spin up quickly the use cases
like proof of humanity, proof of uniqueness. But at the same time, the infrastructure can also help
the builders into Aurora ecosystem for agent identity, agent reputation. And that way,
for agent identity, agent reputation,
and that way this identity layer can help
in terms of spinning up some interesting use cases.
Again, quite excited in terms of being partnered
and helping out the project into the ecosystem.
Also available for anything that the team
may be looking forward to from brainstorming perspective
or any support that they may expect
in terms of how compliances might be useful for their expansion, not just into Web3,
but even going out and interacting with the Web2 users.
Thank you, Ravi, for the introduction.
And what are the verticals that you find most interesting exciting what
kind of projects you'd like to see participate in a Roblox
sure yeah I think what we have been seeing particularly excitement about our indie verticals
of RWA gaming and recently what we have noticed is also different types of
asian marketplaces spinning up i think across this three four areas is something we have been
seeing a lot of excitement and in fact validated from the vc money that is also pouring in
in terms of supporting the projects and builders in this space so quite excited in terms of supporting the projects and builders in this space. So quite excited in terms of this three, four areas.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for that.
I think Audit One wanted to go next.
Hi, Raja.
Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. So I'm Raja, co-founder and CTO of AuditOne.
And coming to AuditOne, we are an auditor aggregator platform. That means we try to bring
together a network of top smart contract auditors and match them with the Web3 projects,
helping teams get security done faster and efficient.
And we just don't stop with the audits,
but also we do asset cover with the help
of our partner organization called Sapura,
which enables projects to offer users an added protection.
And we are also equally excited about the Defi space,
Def AI space.
And our agent recently, which we launched in being alpha testing phase,
helps users to analyze risks and opportunities to reduce exposure before they interact with them.
So in short, we are building a security stack, which covers from audits to coverage as well as intelligence that would help web3 grow
safer and with confidence and what we bring on table for the participants of
Aurora Blocks is that an abundant security advisory and along with that we have certain
monetary benefits straight away where we would like to offer $10,000
of the first security audit for the audit that start with the 20k. So where we want to provide
you with the access to top tier auditors at very, very meaningful discount. And with our Sapphora, we can also offer your users a free cover for your project, for the protocol, where the real-time risk protection is provided to your users.
That is what the users will be looking in today's market.
So whether you are in a pre-launch phase or scaling, it would give you a lot of credibility and helps you build the trust in
the community and if i miss like one of the questions like what vertical excites uh as
most right now so we are really excited about uh defai and where the air and defy intersects
which could be an interesting area because because if you look at Web3,
the adoption is something people try to face certain issues.
So in terms of making Web3 to be adopted at a wider audience,
I think AI could definitely assist a lot.
Maybe in terms of making users interact with on-chain very easily.
This is going to be an amazing space.
So I'm not sure if I missed any question.
Yeah, just one question.
It's the piece of advice for projects, but I guess that would be just make sure you don't
get hacked.
But if you have another advice, go ahead.
Definitely.
That would be being in the security space since a long time.
We see a lot of hacks every day.
Even today, like 200 million worth hack on Sui, you might have observed it.
So this all happens because how much care you take about security,
it's not just a one-time process.
It's something which needs to be taken care of since the beginning,
and it should not be an afterthought.
So in 2025, if you look at the hacks,
one of the largest hacks happened, even like 1.4
billion worth.
And every day you see a lot around them.
So users, the venture capitalists and partners will definitely expect the security of the
project that they're going to support would be top notch.
So what I recommend all projects is, take security from the day one.
It should never be an afterthought.
That means not just getting an audit would help you.
Audit is one of them.
Also try to show users how you are managing risk,
how solid your security poster is.
And then also, whenever these hacks hacks happen users are the ultimate losers so
if you can provide some sort of trust for the trust for them uh not just through audits or
work boundaries that you're placing to show up uh but also have them covered so that's where uh
safra is something which we are helping with. So if you're building for a scale, build for trust.
And that is possible only when you could show up like you are secured enough compared to other projects.
Very sound advice.
Very sound.
So thanks for that.
Everybody be careful.
Let me also. Go ahead me let me jump in so yes security is
super important right that's why we have not one but two security partners unfortunately Haken
couldn't join this space but they also will be part of our incubator program they will be doing a security workshop
and providing the credits for their security services so i personally think there is no level
when you have enough security all right so we uh will be happy uh our incubus to use like
audit one services plus hacking services to make sure that their
their security levels are super robust and they are safe and no exploits nothing will happen
to them so let's move on uh who's next i think alex from peanut trade has something to say
hi guys uh so thank you guys for organizing.
Thank you for having me.
So let's start a short introduction about myself.
I'm in crypto since 2013, early Ethereum investor.
Made a lot of things like it was really hard at the beginning
when it was nothing, but then we found a product market fit and our last pivot
into space it was MEV searcher so we have a lot of experience in trading mainly market
neutral strategies and we built a market making company out of that so now we can help you with
the understanding of the market.
What is even more important is how to prepare, how to configure your TGE, how to do everything that is needed for buying pressure, selling pressure calculation, and a lot of other things that typically behind the curtain. So a lot of projects doesn't know how to
interact with the market makers. It's a lot of very shady contracts with the loan option model,
with other models. So we can help you to go through all of that. And actually, we have two parts in our company.
One part is market making with clients,
and the second part is the prop trading.
So both of it work independently.
It means that unlike some other market makers
with a retainer model,
we know how the big guys from
TreadFi and the OGs from crypto are training with very sophisticated
strategies and we can share it with you. So if your project is anyhow connected
with some trading liquidity or something like that, we can help. So, probably it was a question about verticals. So, as for the vertical, like half a year ago, one year ago, it was memes on top and still it to take their part of the pie and a lot of new projects, AI agents or something like that coming into the market.
And I think it's going to be a lot more.
I'm still not very happy about the current state of RWEA market.
current state of RWEA market, despite Ethereum ICO was all about the RWEA, how to bring real
trading, how the world will use smart contracts instead of lawyers and banks, but we are not
yet, unfortunately, and probably humanity will need a lot of time to solve all the problems.
I hope that someday we will have a really working project which will solve all of that drawbacks from the old world,
and we will see the proper RWA.
So we'll be happy to share all the drawbacks of that model with you if you're doing
something like that. And I think that we will see much more DeFi or something in between DeFi and AI. And the last question probably is about advice.
Okay, so advice, what we can give to the project, maybe most important one from our side.
Despite a lot of people think that market making is very important and could bring you everything solely, it's not true.
So it comes from your community and our advice
is always prepare your marketing, your work with community. You should understand
community sentiment, you should support that and if you will have that we will
be able to do our part of the job much better, much more efficient and help you with liquidity. And as for the offer that we can give,
we can give some kind of consultancy
as a separate part and market-making services
for one month as well.
OK, perfect.
Just to add on, when we were discussing with Alex how Pinotray can contribute, and we came up with the idea to host a token information bootcamp around token design, market maker relations,
all the pitfalls, TGE preparations, and Nadex will be hosting it. And also, Janice, I think he
mentioned from CV Labs that he will be doing a full also bootcamp, fundraising bootcamp,
just to cover different topics, how to get ready for fundraising, data room, set up, pitch deck perhaps,
investors tracking and things like that.
So cool, Ariana, what's to do next? Let's move to market across. Avi.
Hey guys. Hey everyone.
Hey.
Yeah.
Happy pizza day to everyone.
I'm Avi from Market Across.
I'm an account director.
I've been with the company for four years.
We've been in the space for about eight years, I think.
We've worked with a lot of big companies,
small companies.
We represent Binance,
Crypto.com,
and also our favorites.
Sorry, I don't hear you very well.
Maybe also others.
Can you hear me now, sir?
Yeah, you sound kind of far.
Oh, I got up my AirPods. I'm sorry, everyone. Can you hear me now better?
Yeah, better. Thanks.
Okay. Sorry about that, guys.
So, yeah, maybe I'll start a little. I'm from Market Across.
I'm an account director. I've been with the company for four years.
We've been in the States around eight.
We're working with a lot.
We have a lot of other projects that we represent.
Our favorite ones of
course are Aurora and yeah we so what we do is basically PR and marketing we do everything
around PR companies from A to Z meaning any kind of announcement that any project might have, fundraisers, partnerships, product launches, et cetera,
and also content marketing.
We also have a sister company,
maybe you've heard of Chainwire,
the leading wire in the surface,
and yeah, what we plan to do with the project,
onboard Aurora Blocks is actually a workshop of media
training with all the projects and then individually stick with each of the projects
to see how we can help them strategize pr and marketing at their stage yeah i think
I think the advice I would give is a very macro one.
And that I would quote my founder,
he would say,
VR is a marathon, not a sprint.
But what that means is that you won't get,
as a new project in the space,
you won't get an exclusive on Coin.us
after a week you've launched.
You have to kind of, first of all, start small,
build your brand.
Thought leadership in that case is very, very important.
That's also something that we do.
So we, of course, take any commentary opportunities
that come our way, interviews. We also go to a lot of events, of course, take any commentary opportunities that come our way, interviews.
We also go to another event to start the podcast.
Sorry, I lost you in the last few seconds.
If you could repeat, would be great.
Yeah, sure.
So I was saying, I think building your brand is super, super important from the ground up,
meaning you have to take any opportunity that you have to kind of get your narrative out
there and not expect big things to happen super fast. As I said. PR is like a process, you have to start small,
then expect bigger things. And the vertical I would be kind of redundant and say AI for me,
we've just been seeing so many creative projects lately in this vertical, combining Web3 and AI.
And I do think someone has said that before me,
but I do think this is a great opportunity for adoption.
We've been seeing so many things happening in the space
with AI and I think that could open the door
for a lot of normies, quote unquote, to get in the space.
And yeah, I think that's a super
thank you
thank you
all right thank you very much
yes marketing is definitely
super important
hard to get it right in web 3
a lot of
competition
it's hard to get the right the right exposure but with your
help that would be great for projects to get some advice on how to to get it started
so going forward we still have a few other partners who wants to go next.
I think, let me choose.
It's got to be quicker.
Mobula, Sasha, I think you are behind the accounts.
Yeah.
Uh, yeah.
Thanks for having me.
Um, yeah.
To introduce Mobula real quick.
What we do is, um, full stack data infra. Yeah, to introduce Mobila real quick,
what we do is full stack data infra. So basically we try to cover for projects
from like an indexing standpoint,
real time curated APIs,
like a good example of a product
leveraging our tech on the on yeah pretty recent ecosystem is the
GT on mega is and most of the data you see on the front end is coming from
from modular so yeah I guess that's that's pretty much it.
Would you like to highlight what's your type of support you're offering for the QBs?
Yes, it's mostly as I said, like, like, yeah, that API that I can basically.
cool thank you thank you cool so and we're ready to move to our silent giants right uh
Cool.
lemniscop lorenzo or nicola hello can you hear me hey yes sorry. I had some microphone issues.
So, yeah, I'm Lorenzo from Lemniskap.
I'm the portfolio lead.
For who don't know us, we are Web3 early stage investment firm since 2017.
We have been backing exceptional founders since today. uh since uh today and we are a kind of long-term partner uh with the project way back aurora
is one of the project we backed back in the days um i would say like we are really excited to
support this program uh we can offer a combination of operational support, our network access, the mentorship
to the project participating to this program.
So really excited to get hands on with the program.
You know, we like one vertical, we are kind of vertical agnostic because we have been investing in many, many verticals over time.
But one of my favorite is definitely consumer applications.
So real products that retail users can use, new use cases for the blockchain technology.
It's getting more and more interesting.
Of course, we are also following the latest market trends.
There's this AI narrative, robotics narrative,
stable coins narrative,
which are getting more and more traction at the moment.
And seems like it's gonna be some of the main topics for the near future.
We've been watching
a lot of different topics over time,
especially in the risk-taking ecosystems,
the modular infrastructures,
and AI as well.
I feel like we don't have specific advice for
projects participating to this program. But definitely, one
thing we can say is that get closer to your users as early
as possible.
Try to build fast, iterate fast.
Don't be afraid to position in the market.
Be very aware of the UX and the UI,
which is one of the major blockers for early stage companies in Web3.
And the go-to-market strategies combine uh distribution timing and storytelling uh all get mixed together so um there is no one single solution to all of
this uh but try to stay up to date with what's happening around you try to understand who your users are going to be.
And yeah, that's my personal advice to the participants of this project.
I don't know if I forgot any of the other questions.
No, you did great.
All was covered and great advice, very comprehensive, very great advice. And hopefully you participants will get a lot of this help from this incubator program.
Now, next, we have the last one, which should be here.
Yes, should be near.
From near Founders Success Team. Hey, everybody. Hi. Shai here. Yes. It should be near. From near founder success team.
Hey, everybody.
Shy here.
Nice to jump on.
Hopefully the audio is all right.
So pleasure to meet everybody.
My name is Shy. I have the fortunate opportunity
that I get to say that my parents
at some point knew
that I'd be half compute
and half human.
So they just included it in my name.
Actually, I grew up on a computer.
I had my first device when I was eight.
It was the old Compact ALT 286, if anybody knows what that is.
So I've been in IT and tech in general for about 30 years now.
I started off building NT networks and distributed storage and compute.
Actually, I was forward to deploy the Navy in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, doing that right after 9-11.
I was early in the Web 2 side, building in e-commerce experiences back from the 2000 days. And then I started building in the enterprise scale around 2010
when I was at Deloitte and then Lockheed Martin in lead architect roles.
The Bitcoin side, I built my Bitcoin miner in 2010. Unfortunately, wiped the hard drive,
put kids' movies on there, threw the miner somewhere in storage and haven't been able
to find it since. So in 2018, I focused on a small little project called JP Coin.
I was part of the AWS solution architecture team, and I led the effort to help JP Morgan
understand Hyperledger, how to deploy blockchain at AWS and all the Web2 pieces and components
around it.
That really sparked my interest that blockchain as a tech was ready for institutional players
and enterprises.
And so in 2020, I founded Amazon and AWS's permissionless strategy. And I led that effort
for a couple of years, building out the go-to-market team, the solution architecture team,
the partner organization, and then helping build out the BD and sales teams as well.
And I've led solution architecture teams and helped founders since that day. I've had a lot
of fun throughout my experiences,
both in engineering and architect roles as a product builder.
My focus is always about working backwards from the customer.
And so that brings us to why we're here today.
I am a principal architect, an ecosystem architect,
specifically within the Neer Foundation
on what we call the founder success team.
Myself, as well as my peers,
we're already focused on building an ecosystem, accelerating our strategic partnerships, and building the technical enablement strategies
that we find builders in the Web3 and AI space need. When I look at the Aurora Blocks initiative,
this is really exciting because this year, particularly, our team is really focusing hard
on building the bridges from these kind of incubators and hackathons and venture thons and some of these cool opportunities that are out there to help
builders continue to be successful months and years after the events as well. By, you know,
helping builders understand how to navigate the ecosystem, how to navigate partnerships,
how to build relationships. We provide technical labelment support as well by focusing on
things like workshops and blueprint code and making sure that developers and builders
have that very clear path to growing up from a builder to a founder and then maturing and being
really successful in this space. So again, we provide the go-to-market strategies, a lot of
the partnerships and initiatives and support overall for builders as they grow and mature
throughout their product. When we don't want to look at projects and some of the products are successful,
some of the things that really makes us builders successful is really about the
user experience, right? And focusing on that user experience. And that's something I
always try to suggest is focus on that user experience, not the tech. Build for the problem,
not the solution that you envision, right? So while there's really cool tech things like the smart wallets we have intense
we have chain abstraction we have all this cool technology don't think about just how i use it
think about how does that change the user experience for the user what can the customer
do differently now that they couldn't do before and how does it make it much easier for them
when you look at building with frameworks, right, there's no shortage of SDKs within
the Nier ecosystem and a whole bunch of other third-party developers and tools that provide
their SDKs and their APIs.
It's great to have that shortcut and have that easy onboarding experience.
However, as a builder, you really should take some time and have a good understanding as
to what is going on behind the scenes. Why is
the API call taking so long? Where's my data going? When I use that SDK, what other libraries
are part of the SDK? You don't want to get in a situation where you're stuck in this dependency
hell environment where you find yourself using too many third-party tools and you don't quite
understand them and you can't get out of that pit that you dug yourself into. So I always encourage builders to really take the time
to understand what it is that they're building with, why they're building it, and again,
have that customer focus. Is this really good to add? Is this SDK, this API going to add value for
my users and solve their problem ultimately? The other last thing, and this is one thing that our
team does really well, is really focusing on building a deep collaborative partnership very early on, right? Just because
you're a solo founder, maybe a team of two, three, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be thinking
about your go-to-market activities. It doesn't mean you should be thinking about partnerships,
co-building, co-marketing with others. If you do that, that's going to give you a lot of visibility
through validity.
And because you're able to validate your solutions with partners, with the ecosystem, as you get out there and as your product grows, you will naturally earn that credibility that we
all seek because then that credibility brings a natural and organic community ecosystem with it.
So again, always focus on that product, that customer, building those deep partnership and
relationships and stuff like that. Very keen and important there. The last part around the vertical that I'm most
excited about, I'm still a bit of an old school fan of the edtech and education experiences in
blockchain AI. But I think that's the key part now is that while we've been talking about
blockchain and education and certifiable credentials, which is very empowering, you know,
outside of the first world in a lot of the countries that don't have some of the systems
we have here in the US. It's unfortunately, education is still very fragmented in general,
it's very inequitable. Across the world, even here in the US, the challenges that the education
system is changing, and it's pushing more and more responsibility on not only the students,
not only the parents, not only the local community, the teachers, but it's becoming more decentralized.
And I think it's really time that both as parents, educators, my father, four, we take that ownership
and start to own our education, but also our children's education and really empower our
children to own that education. And so when we look at blockchain specifically here, the students gain access to secured
credentials that they can keep on chain.
They're able to then prove those credentials, where they studied, how they studied, only
release the answer of the credential.
They don't have to give any of the online data using zero knowledge proofs.
And that's really empowering to a student that
maybe doesn't have access to a proper educational system or even an archival system that the school
or education system might use in that area. The other part is when we combine all that
underlying data that is the foundational layer of Web3 with AI on top of that being the presentation
layer, we now look at a customized educational path. If our AI agents and our tooling can understand all the things that the student has done and
hasn't done, it could also allow them to navigate their educational path on their own.
And that is hugely empowering when a student can choose to learn about a topic in the style
of Harry Potter, Star Wars, or whatever else that they want.
So long as they're learning and taking that ownership and control,
that is really what's driving them.
And that's the important part of the future
and how the future generations will be successful.
It's because they own that education.
They own their future career.
And so that is my real mission in life,
is to empower a lot of these young students
throughout middle school and high school,
and even in college,
to really take a lot of ownership of their education and their future because ultimately they own their career to the
very end. So very excited about the program and what we're building here and I think it's a great
opportunity to drive education in the ecosystem and drive really builder knowledge. Thank you for
the opportunity. Great thank you Shai for the introduction you shared some pearls there
so we still have some minutes and would be nice to open the floor for a discussion
among us and the partners we touched a lot of points with your introductions. You gave some advice
to projects. Maybe now we can go on to talk about what makes a project worth funding.
Some advice for people that are considering applying. What are some of the checkbox you're looking for when considering
applications and what are some mistakes that early stage builders tend to make.
It's an open floor, so just feel free to jump in and share your advice.
I'll jump in real quick.
I mean, I mentioned one of these things in the past.
I just want to kind of bring it up again
in a different perspective is always focus
on what it is that the customer needs,
what the problem is that you're trying to solve.
The solution might change and that might evolve over time.
Don't get married to that solution.
Get married to the problem and really focus
and have that deep in your heart.
When you do, you will find the most optimal solution
to get there and you will solve the problem
for the people that really need it the most.
After that stage, then you can focus on scaling
and kind of growing, finding other use cases
and getting out to market.
But you'll build that visibility and validity
and validity very early on by earning credibility
very early on by earning credibility
because you worked backwards from that customer problem.
Yeah, so in your perspective, a project that is worth funding,
it's one that really has a clear idea of what the problem is
that they want to solve.
Yeah, correct.
Yeah, knowing that the problem,
it's cool to understand all the tech you want to
use it's cool to understand everything but like why what is this unique problem that you're bringing
that requires a dedicated chain like we know that dedication is cool it has a lot of value to it
there's there's a great value in using it but why is it solving that unique problem that you have and
that's that's the important part that we need to think about as builders. Yeah, totally agree.
Anyone wants to jump in to the conversation?
Definitely, I agree with Shai.
Always get married to your problem and solutions is something which differs based on user expectations being changing day to day.
day to day. But I would like to take a step ahead from here. Like, let's say once your problem is
But I would like to take a step ahead from here.
sorted and once your solution is there, if you're going for kind of investments or let's say
if you want to prove that your product has real value, early traction is something which
should be definitely considered where it's not just about your users paying for that particular thing and using it
at what you're expecting it to be.
But rather, what I would recommend
is have some proof that users are going to use it in terms
of maybe it deployed on testnet.
Or let's say you are having a social proof
that your community is reacting a lot to what you're building
when you are in the face of finding solution
for the problem that you have identified.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
That's also a very important part.
Go ahead, Ravi.
I think I wanted to add a couple of points.
I think many times Web3 founders are trying to see in terms of the token value appreciation as the revenue model.
I personally feel that thinking from the early days in terms of what real revenue model might be there from a product might be an interesting
perspective with the changing dynamics i think even from an investor perspective uh revenue
generating projects are something that most of the vcs have been looking forward to in the web3 space
as well and bringing in users from the from the web2 space who can also utilize the product in
case if there is an offering for that.
I think that's also good testimonial for the projects in order to see not just the crypto
cult, but a solution that can be for the larger problem statement.
Anyone else wants to say something?
All right.
Well, we covered a lot of ground
and really thank you guys for coming to the Twitter space.
This was a great opportunity to highlight the program,
but also what you guys are doing and contributing to it. And hopefully, people will be inspired to
apply, but also to listen to some sound advice that has been shared here.
Just a reminder for everyone,
this is really a great opportunity for anyone that has a good idea,
has a good,
that really wants to build something useful,
that wants to launch a virtual chain on near you can get a lot of support from the partners that were here today and you can get funding we will select five projects and you still have two
weeks to one week to apply up to the 28th of may so it's a bit less than a week, actually.
But you still have time.
If you have a great idea, please apply.
You can do that at aurorablocks.dev.
And the program will last six weeks
and will be followed by an open day
where you can showcase what you've built
during this program.
It's fun.
It's very exciting to see what ideas people will come up with.
And we're really looking forward to seeing the applications.
So once again, thank you guys for coming in today.
And we'll talk to you hopefully another time and see you at the open day.
Thank you, thank you, Ariana, for hosting this Twitter space and thank you for all our partners
for joining us and supporting us during our incubator journey. Stay safe, safe positive,
have a good day. Or week, or evening, or night.
Bye, guys.
Bye.
Thank you, guys.
Bye. Thank you.
