You already know about the $150K+ prize pool. But do you know who's actually deciding who takes it home? For 10X Founders Demo Day v2.0 we didn't just fill six judge seats. We built a panel of people who've actually operated inside this industry, not just written checks into it - operators who've run exchange platforms, engineered tokenomics for billion-dollar protocols, and grown ecosystem TVL by billions in under a year. If your pitch has any soft spots, this is the room that finds them 🔍 Meet the panel: @Obsid1an_ - Associate Director, Investment & Strategic Partnership at @animocabrands Animoca Brands: 600+ portfolio companies, 20+ verticals, from gaming to RWA. Ian's focus is infrastructure and tokenization - he built Animoca's staking business and advises on tokenomics for a $2B gaming project. Expect questions that go deeper than the deck @r_m_evdokimov - Venture Partner at @ContributionCap A $30M pre-seed/seed fund backing infra, middleware and Fintech 3.0 (@lifiprotocol, @zkPass, @ethos_network and more). Roman spent 15+ years in marketing, BD and Web3 before this. Expect him to skip the buzzwords and test if you actually understand your own business @Ivantok4 - Founding Partner at @comma3vc ~$50M AUM, all-in on Sui this cycle - Ivan's team helped grow its TVL from $250M to $2.35B in under a year. Ex-TSMC engineer, 35+ exits, co-founder of Taiwan's first bitcoin treasury company. Expect him to stress test your tech as hard as your model @Chloeeewrx_ - Investment Director, Portfolio Manager & PR Director at @fenbushi Asia's first blockchain VC, founded 2015, ~$1.6B AUM, 300+ portfolio companies including Ethereum, Circle and Consensys. A decade of pattern recognition behind every question she asks @al_nechaev - Partner at @FundersVC Funders VC is a $20M AUM asset management firm operating at the intersection of venture and liquid DeFi - backing early-stage DeFi and RWA protocols while running delta-neutral and yield strategies in-house. Its portfolio includes Flying Tulip, Lighter, RAND and other emerging projects across the space @LafaMarino - Analyst at @ZeePrimeCap Investing since 2019 across early-stage startups and liquid markets (Polymarket, Solana, DeSci). Tadas' background is in research at the European Central Bank and Bank of Lithuania. If your pitch chases a trend instead of a real wedge, expect that to surface That's not a judge panel. That's six people who've actually built what they'll be judging you on 🎯 And one more thing worth saying out loud: pitching here isn't just about the $150K. Beyond the panel, a packed room of top-tier VCs, angel investors, and ecosystem partners will be tuning in as attendees. It's a shot in front of investors who'd normally take months of intros to reach individually, all in one room, on one day And time is officially ticking - there are only 7 days left to apply ⏳ In one week, applications close and "I'll do it later" won't be an option anymore. If your project is ready to be seen, now is the time 8 founders. 6 judges. One stage. August 25 🔥 🔗 Apply now:

Not only accelerating founders, but making sure their stories get heard Proud to have @CointelegraphAc co-hosting 10X Founders Demo Day v2.0 🔥 They put $10,000 in media credits behind the winning team - press releases and sponsored articles across one of the most-read publications in crypto But the credits are the smaller part of what they bring to this stage Cointelegraph Accelerator works with post-MVP companies. Not decks, not concepts - teams with a product in market and traction to point at. That filter exists because they've seen what happens on the other side: coverage reaches an audience, the audience arrives and if the product isn't ready, the exposure works against the team rather than for it Which is the same reason Demo Day screens for a working product before anything else. Both of us are looking at the same stage of company, for the same reason Where they add something we can't: distribution. A team can build the right thing and still lose to a team that built the wrong thing louder. Cointelegraph Accelerator closes that gap - media reach, credibility with the people who fund the next round and a network of founders and investors that opens after the coverage lands Eight founders on stage. One of them walks away with that behind their launch 10X Founders Demo Day v2.0 · August 25 🔗 Apply now:

Today, we're excited to officially launch 10X Founders Demo Day v2.0, hosted by @InspiraLabsHQ, @Yellow and @cicada_mm @SonicLabs joins 10X Founders Demo Day v2.0 as our Anchor Partner. More than supporting the initiative with its extensive ecosystem, Sonic Labs is putting real capital behind founders, helping turn promising projects into high-growth companies This time, we're honored to commence this occasion with seven co-hosts standing with us: @injective, @1inch, @CointelegraphAc, @Galxe, @Cryptic_Web3, @hackenclub and @AtlasOracleX - backed by CMC Last but not least, we're thrilled to have @BitcoinNews, @CoinMarketCap, @CryptoRank_io, @Cointelegraph, @incrypted and @Assemble_io on board as our media partners, helping bring the stories of the next generation of builders to a global audience $150K+ in the prize pool: ecosystem grants and investments, acceleration, GTM support, SDK and advisory access, market making, audit credits, and media exposure. We've assembled the resources founders need to build, launch and scale This is the lineup we've been building toward If you've got something worth showing, August 25 is your day 🔗 Apply now →

Introducing Velvet-1: AI Model for Onchain Intelligence Today, we are commencing training for Velvet-1, our first flagship LLM for onchain intelligence. Onchain analytics is lagging behind coding and general knowledge reasoning capabilities. For truly effective onchain analytics, LLMs need to be constantly online: monitoring, detecting, and understanding data that is deeply interconnected. This must happen in real time, amidst high-velocity change. General-purpose models can reason about crypto, markets, and protocols in isolation, but they struggle to understand the full context of onchain & social systems. Their context windows and memory were designed and trained to work with static code and text data, not with onchain and social dynamics. We have developed new types of layers, context, and training techniques to handle these problems. The model is being developed on large-scale, continuously indexed datasets spanning: - Full onchain activity across major networks, including transactions, smart contract events, state changes, and mempool signals - Hyperliquid-specific market data, including perpetual orderbooks, funding rates, liquidations, trader positioning, and flow dynamics - Social and behavioral signals, including onchain and offchain graphs, wallet clustering, and profile embeddings Over the coming months, we will share technical updates, evaluation benchmarks, infrastructure notes, and early capability results as Velvet-1 progresses. Velvet-1 is our first step toward by-design on-chain intelligence.