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- The Best Startup of 2024
TL;DR: Vote for the best startup of 2024! If you missed BTC at $50k, check out GoMining, our Miami event sponsor, for cloud mining opportunities. Our community project, CESS, continues node sales. Also, don’t miss the latest venture news on Confluence VC.
2024 felt like a decade—so full of events that simply surviving it is an achievement. I’ve hosted 13 pitch events this year and want to determine the best of the best. That’s why we’ve started a Twitter poll, which already has 100 reposts. Let’s revisit the startups, starting with the last one.
GoArlo - Warren nailed our Miami pitch competition in December, which had a super strong line-up. Intersection of AI agents and token research along with Solana grant made a pitch very appealing to our VC judges. Vote for them.
Web3 enabler - Alex has been pitching at our competitions since 2023. Finally his pitch reached the winning clarify - a corporate wallet for salesforce ecosystem. They are running a campaign on Republic that already attracted 128 investors. Vote for them.
WowMax Exchange - Could a DEX aggregator nowadays be a sexy startup? Almir was able to impress judges with his routing mechanism and deep knowledge of DeFi. Vote for them.
Electratrade - a decentralized perpetual exchange on TON that didn’t get a first place at Blockchainlife conference, but our competition fixed the error. Arseniy was probably the most tattooed contestant among ~100 startups that we’ve seen pitching this year. Vote for them.
Immutable Labs - Ali did a second try at our pitch and won at UCLA. Besides having a great tech, Ali is a foodie and OG. The stories he tells are hilarious. It’s always a pleasure to see him in LA and across the globe. Vote for them.
Cosign - Cardin had a quote from Snoop Dogg on his pitch deck about minuscule Spotify royalties, while we had a Snoop Dogg’s son in a jury. What a coincidence? Vote for them.
PlayFi - Ben pitched for the second time. This time he was prepared with traction and real use cases. It was a well deserved victory in NYC. Vote for them.
PaxumProtocol - Ryan is a participant of CryptoKnightsTVShow. I don’t know if he won the show, but he definitely won our Singapore pitch competition. Vote for them.
Shark Labs - Nikita is the youngest of all our participants this year. He is still in high school. His team works at Station 3 in NYC after school. They are focusing on fast nodes on Solana. Nikita has a founder mentality. Watch him. Vote for them.
Native - Shiva pitched right after his flight from Dubai to Nashville. He did a great job. Bitcoin L2 is one of the narratives of 2025. Vote for them.
YieldBricks - Alen came up with the cool nave for RWA project that tokenizes real estate in Turkey and EU. Vote for them.
Plato - Robert is a second time founder. His personal story around small family restaurant coupled with traction made his pitch very appealing. Vote for them.
MyCoralApp - incubated by Binance Labs, shipping its first phone right now. Vote for them.
Klink finance - in the disrupted by flood Dubai Chris delivered outstanding pitch. It’s already a Taisu Ventures portfolio company. Vote for them.
Blaze - Faiyam was also pitching for the second time at our Duke Web3 Conference and won. Now they are part of Y-combinator. Vote for them.
Liquidium - one of the first DeFi on BTC projects. A lot of members of our community started to use them. Vote for them.
VVote to support projects and discover something useful for your Web3 journey. I’m keeping project details brief because I want you to do your own research. As always, none of this constitutes financial or investment advice.
Our Miami investor dinner sponsor, GoMining, rhymes with “GoDuke,” making it a perfect match for us. They are entering the U.S. market with their cloud mining offering and rank as the #10 miner worldwide by hash-rate power. You can meet them this May at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, where they’ll be one of the sponsors. Beyond their cloud offerings, they’ve also created a launchpad for promising projects.
Learn more about GoMining’s products here. If you’d like a trial or a bonus miner, email me your user ID from the GoMining platform.
Miami dinner with GoMining
2025 could be the year of mass adoption, where end users interact seamlessly with applications without even noticing the blockchain technology running behind the scenes.
One of the standout community projects driving this vision is CESS, which is building a decentralized data network.
Why do we need this? Because tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon hold too much power, set increasing prices, and dominate the data landscape.
Decentralized file storage has been around for years but hasn’t gained significant traction. For example, Filecoin has only about 2,000 customers. Why? Because most of the data we consume is hot or warm—it needs to be ready for immediate retrieval. Filecoin primarily focuses on cold storage, which isn’t suitable for real-time needs, and this has hindered its mass adoption.
CESS, however, is solving this by focusing on hot and warm data, coupled with the vertical integration of their own decentralized CDN. This approach is poised to bridge the gap and unlock the true potential of decentralized storage for everyday use. If you want to be part of their journey, check their nodes.
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None of the above constitutes a financial or investment advice, please make your own research.