YZi Labs
@yzilabs
YZi Labs invests in ventures at every stage, prioritizing those with solid fundamentals in Web3, AI, and biotech.
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🟡 GM - It's YZi Talent Monday.
Open roles this week:
@BitwayOfficial → Quantitative Researcher
@perena → Perennials Growth Lead, Solana Protocol Engineer, Marketing Lead, Legal & Regulatory Counsel
Join the teams helping capital move, compound, and coordinate more intelligently.
Explore more openings at
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As software gets easier to build, the bottleneck moves downstream: trust, liquidity, and distribution.
For fintech and stablecoin startups, the harder questions are:
> How do you earn trust?
> Where does liquidity come from?
> Who already has the users you need?
> Which market can you become indispensable in first?
A strong early wedge often comes from concentrated distribution.
From @AlexLWitt at our @EASYResidency workshop.
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Stablecoins run on global rails, but the opportunities at the application layer remain local.
From @AlexLWitt at @EASYResidency workshop:
> Africa → on/off-ramps
> LatAm → remittances + regional payments
> Middle East → UAE-centric
> APAC → Multi-hub market
> US/EU → RegTech + agentic payments
Two-thirds of stablecoin companies were founded in the last two years. But the next winners won’t follow one global playbook -- they’ll be shaped by local market structure.
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As AI agents proliferate, creation becomes commoditized. Distribution, reputation and transactions become the harder problems.
The next challenge is turning a growing supply of agents into a functioning market.
@BNBCHAIN is inviting builders to build that market, with $40K+ in prizes ↓
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+200,000 AI agents are registered on BNB Smart Chain.
The next challenge is helping people find, compare & hire them.
Build the Era is an open hackathon to build the official BNB Agent Studio marketplace, with $40,000+ in prizes from BNB Chain, @TermiX_AI, @PancakeSwap, @alt_layer, @binance Pay and @AltanaNetwork 🧵👇
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Stablecoins first scaled as digital dollars for global markets. They’re now emerging as multi-currency infrastructure for local payments and settlement.
BRL, JPY, EUR, SGD, HKD are among the early signals of this broader shift.
From @odagius in @Forbes
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For DeFi builders, payments are the entry point to a much larger financial system:
Payments → user growth → network effects → capital retention → liquidity → financing.
As the system evolves, so does the source of power: first distribution, then liquidity, and ultimately capital allocation.
The winners will be those with an edge difficult to commoditize - whether in regulation, distribution, risk management, user quality, institutional access, or product design.
Insights from @Stanford Professor @ruizhejia at the @EASYResidency workshop.
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🟡 This week’s new opening across our portfolio:
• Hardware Engineer, Consumer Electronics @OneKeyHQ
Plus 27 roles across the wider YZi Labs ecosystem.
Find your next opportunity at - and build what’s next across the finance and intelligent systems.
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Stablecoins are moving beyond cross-border payments into domestic settlement.
As banks and local-currency issuers enter, the edge will increasingly lie in distribution: regulatory access, payment integrations, liquidity, and customer reach.
Read @odagius's piece in @Forbes ↓
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At their best, prediction markets are economic systems for producing, rewarding, and aggregating information.
Just as crypto exchanges evolved through multiple generations, prediction markets will go through their own regime shifts.
Over the next five years, the winners will return to the fundamentals: better incentives, better information, and better decisions.
Insights from @Stanford Professor @RuizheJia at the @EASYResidency workshop.
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📷 More snapshots from our special night - with Prof. @danboneh, host of SBC, leading cryptographer, and Co-Director of @CBRStanford, together with a community pushing the frontiers of blockchain tech.
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🌙 What a room at Build N Build Night!
On the sidelines of SBC, YZi Labs & @BNBChain brought researchers, founders, and investors under one roof to explore how technical breakthroughs become products, companies, and new markets.
Thank you to everyone who joined us in Palo Alto. We can’t wait to do it again!
🤝 @BNBChain @CBRStanford @initc3org @theBBFund @StanfordSBA
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🌙 What a room at Build N Build Night!
On the sidelines of SBC, YZi Labs & @BNBChain brought researchers, founders, and investors under one roof to explore how technical breakthroughs become products, companies, and new markets.
Thank you to everyone who joined us in Palo Alto. We can’t wait to do it again!
🤝 @BNBChain @CBRStanford @initc3org @theBBFund @StanfordSBA
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Waitlist now open for our Science of Blockchain Conference reception, Build N Build Night!
Come hear from @ellazhang516 and our partners from @BNBCHAIN, and connect with the broader YZi Labs, BNB, and SBC community.
📅 July 28, 6pm-9pm
🍔🍷 Food and drinks provided
Last chance to register 👇
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The most underrated growth strategy is honesty.
@avichal, cofounder @ElectricCapital: "At least for now, the market is still a collection of humans making purchasing decisions. Each person is evaluating the product - or the person behind it - and asking: Is this person telling me the truth?"
When everyone sounds the same, honesty cuts through.
So start internally: find what you uniquely believe, then be willing to say it.
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A founder can iterate on a product, but not indefinitely against who they are.
@avichal, cofounder @ElectricCapital, says that beyond user feedback, retention, and product velocity, PMF is also shaped by the founder’s strengths, instincts, and relationship with the market.
Founder-market fit determines where those iterations are most likely to compound.
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Crypto’s path to adoption runs through utility.
Stablecoins first gave traders a crypto-native way to move between positions and hold dollar-denominated value. They later became core infrastructure for DeFi - and are now expanding into cross-border payments, particularly in markets underserved by traditional finance.
@odagius on the industry’s shift from crypto-native use cases to real-world value.
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In 2017, talking about crypto at a major financial institution could put your career at risk.
Today, the bigger risk is having no digital asset strategy at all. 👀
Having seen the shift from both sides of the table, @odagius sees regulatory clarity as the catalyst unlocking new revenue, lower costs, and onchain innovation for institutions.
(From @miaferrariii’s @MadSocietyTV interview）
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DAT investors closely track premiums and discounts to NAV.
The more fundamental question is: can they verify how the underlying NAV was calculated?
@odagius proposes a disclosure standard for DATs: traceable, timestamped, and reproducible ↓
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🟡This week's hiring across our portfolio:
• Risk Control Specialist (Derivatives) -- @Aster_DEX
• Marketing Lead, Perenimals Growth Lead, Senior PM-- @perena
For operators building the future of onchain trading & stablecoin infrastructure →
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Currencies, identities, and public services are becoming digital, and so is the infrastructure of government itself. — @realyanxin, Co-founder & CEO of @Sign
But before AI can interact with these systems, they need to become machine-readable: structured as data, software, and APIs.
The real challenge lies underneath: privacy, access controls, and complexities invisible from the outside.
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Crypto payments still face friction across user education, product usability, and regulation. For startups, the key is to overcome the friction, pick one wedge, and go deep. — @cz_binance
That could be:
> one high-volume remittance corridor, like UAE → Philippines or UAE → India
> one underserved geography
> one new category, like payments for AI agents
Win the wedge. Build the foothold.
Then earn the right to expand.
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