Xcelerator Fall 2022 Updates: CESC.io & Demo Day Countdown, Fairmint’s Demo, Bit.Country’s Launch, Vite’s 7th Mainnet Upgrade & More
The Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator is an internationally recognized, non-dilutive source of support for startups in the global Blockchain ecosystem and was formed through a partnership between the Haas School of Business, Blockchain at Berkeley student group, and Berkeley Engineering’s RDI & previously SCET.
Check out the Xcelerator Homepage.
UC Berkeley is ranked the #1 university for blockchain in the US for a second year in a row!
Berkeley Ecosystem Updates
Countdown to Crypto Economics Security Conference 2022
Berkeley RDI will host the long-standing CESC.io academic conference associated with SF Blockchain Week on Oct 31-Nov 1. CESC had over 170 paper submissions, making it the conference with the highest number of paper submissions in blockchain/web3 to date. Close to 1,500 have now registered to attend CESC.io with a mix of developers/builders, researchers, faculty, VCs, and students at all levels from numerous colleges and universities.
Countdown to CESC Affiliated Xcelerator Demo Day & Career Fair
Countdown to CESC Affiliated Zero-Knowledge Proof Workshop
The Zero-Knowledge Proof Workshop aims to gather researchers, students, practitioners, and entrepreneurs in academia and industry interested in the design of zero-knowledge proofs and their applications in blockchain and web3. Submit your talk proposal here by October 10th here. More details: https://rdi.berkeley.edu/zkp-workshop-2022/
CESC.io, hosted by Berkeley RDI, also includes Lightning Talks — Apply here
Exploring the Privacy Risks of the Metaverse
Having thirty study participants play-tested an innocent-looking “Virtual Escape Room” that was created by academic researchers at UC Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence, behind the scenes, an adversarial program had accurately inferred over 25 personal data attributes. While metaverse received increased attention and investment, research topics on privacy and security remain relatively understudied. Berkeley researchers not only shed light on the privacy risks of the metaverse but also proposed the defense against the hidden dangers, MetaGuard.
Read the relevant research paper.
Xcelerator Team Updates
Bit.Country Pioneer App is LIVE
On Sept 12, Bit.Country Pioneer App went LIVE. Bit.Country Pioneer App focuses on user-created metaverses, it allows users to launch their metaverse simply and quickly, create their metaverse as a web3 business hub to provide brand connectivity and establish their own NFT marketplace.
In the first three days since its launch, Bit.Country Pioneer had over 66 metaverse projects created and a total of 3.5 million NEER staked.
Dtravel Completes First Smart Contract Vacation Rental Booking
Dtravel recently completed the world’s first smart contract based vacation rental booking. To improve on the existing smart contract, design is underway for Dtravel v3 which will enable the booking smart contract to be the single source of truth for all channels across the industry. Early discussions with industry-leading property management systems to support this are going well. Dtravel was also recently accepted into the Plug & Play Accelerator putting us on center stage in front of the world's biggest travel companies. Dtravel has also recently secured its first partner to distribute host property listings to millions of crypto-centric travelers around the world, exciting news is coming soon.
Fairmint to Demo Community SAFE at Converge 22
Fairmint participated at Converge 22 (9/27–9/30 in SF) to demo their latest innovation, the Community SAFE. With Fairmint, founders can launch a fully automated SAFE in a matter of minutes, enabling their community to invest their time & money. Fairmint’s revolutionary software eliminates middlemen by being the first full-stack, DeFi-powered solution to make equity programmable. Visit booth S22, and don’t forget to drop by their happy hour on 9/27 at 6:30 pm at Executive Order (868 Mission St) to chat with the team. Link to RSVP.
Vite Achieves 7th Mainnet Upgrade
Vite achieved its 7th Mainnet Upgrade “Uranus” which was supported by multiple exchanges including Binance and Mandala. Vite COO Richard Yan spoke at a side event panel during the Stanford Blockchain Conference with panelists from Coinbase and The Decentralization Foundation at the Plug and Play Tech Center. Vite also launched “Vite Passport”, the official VIte wallet extension on Google Chrome. This extension allows users to create or import a Vite wallet, send and receive funds, and many other helpful functions.
Read more here.
Overnight Gains 10x Growth in TVL and 5x in Users
Overnight closed pre-Seed at the end of January 2022, went into open beta April 30th, 2022, despite the timing coinciding with the UST crash, has been having great momentum, largely helped by increased risk aversion across DeFi:
1) TVL has exceeded 5 M USD, x10 growth since UST crash in May
2) # of users has exceeded 2,5K, i.e. x5 growth since May
3) USD+ daily trading volumes have fluctuated in the range of 0.5–1M per day depending on market volatility, on average exceeding 14.5% of TVL, putting USD+ b/w BUSD and USDC on this metric, far ahead of such stablecoins as LUSD, Frax, MAI and even DAI
The growth has been driven by:
— Partnerships with Dexes, in particular, Dystopia/Penrose and Cone/Unknown
— Partnerships with other projects that chose to establish trading pairs with USD+: Lido (stMatic), Sphere, Tetu, OtterClam, MDB, Parrotly Finance etc.
— Launch of highly attractive (and very high margin for overnight) product
— ETS, a quasi-stable high-yield strategy product on top of USD+/wMatic and USD+/wBNB pools (with hedged crypto price-risk)
— Expansion to BSC chain
OAK Network Releases Auto-compounding
1- OAK released auto compounding APIs for staking on the Turing Network. (Source)
2- Turing’s auto-compounding for staking rewards is now available on mobile-wallet. (Source)
3- Turing has opened bi-directional HRMP channels with Haiku, Karura, Mangata, Bifrost, Shadow, and Khala. (Source)
4- OAK executed the TUR-MGX Liquidity Bootstrapping Event and published regarding $TUR Price Discovery & Crowdloan Rewards Evaluation. (Source)
5- OAK Network announces its participation in the upcoming Polkdot Crowdloan started on September 20th and published a guide on how to contribute to the OAK Network Polkadot Crowdloan. (Source)
NoRamp Launches the First and Only Decentralized Digital Asset Transfer Solution via Direct Peer-to-peer Fiat Payment
NoRamp is the first and only decentralized digital asset transfer solution via direct peer-to-peer fiat payment. Currently available on NEAR and ETH, the NoRamp team will deploy additional chains every 1–2 weeks. NoRamp’s dev documentation, Testnet platform, and fiat explorer just went live. Looking forward, the team will be adding a wallet creation function and additional dev tools.
MetaMirror Launched MBuddy Identity Use Case: Multi-platform Smart Campaigns
MetaMirror aims to build a privacy-preserving identity layer that connects users’ Web2 data to Web3 identity. This month, MetaMirror launched its first public service: automated campaigns with smart NFT/SBT airdrops. More than 80 partners and 37K users have onboarded the ecosystem. To scale its’ use case, MetaMirror has started 1st round of private sales.
