Been exploring early-stage robotics companies recently. We've all heard of Figure and other big names, but watching what's happening at grassroots level is super interesting. Here are 11 companies founded since 2023 with < $100m in funding that caught my eye. Thread: 1/17.

Everyone tonight

If you were paid for 11 weeks to be taught by top developers how to: * build smart contracts * build frontends that interact with them * on Terra or Ethereum * at the end if you do well you get a job doing said things Would you do it?

Working in crypto is like

State of finance: anonymous frogs are building an alternative financial system and that’s actually our best bet.

1/ If you have > $100k in crypto and all you do to keep yourself informed is Twitter and podcasts then you might want to consider investing in the following:

1/ Over the last few years we at @delphi_digital have worked closely with Aave, Synthetix, Axie and more to design their economic systems. Now we're bringing those learnings to @terra_money by working with six projects we believe can take TeFi to the next level 👇

Whenever I hang out with ETH maxis I find them really likeable. They are often idealistic, semi-anarchistic, cyberpunk OGs. They remind me of what crypto was when I first got involved. Something bullish in there.

The thing is DeFi is genuinely useful. It's not like the market is just going to go hibernate for three years like last time.

These are the toughest days of my career no doubt. But being a builder is about overcoming setbacks. About not giving up when things stop going to plan. So let’s keep building.

Assuming no significant withdrawals there'll be 8.8m $LUNA locked in @astroport_fi for an average of 130 days 🔒🌕

The Cosmos/Tendermint/Confio teams don’t get enough credit for what they’ve built.

It is programmed

My guess is in a few years crypto will be a multichain space with most activity split between several Cosmos chains + Solana + Ethereum

0/ Today Delphi Labs has submitted posts to the governance forums of @mirror_protocol, @anchor_protocol and @pylon_protocol proposing that they transition liquidity mining rewards away from the existing Terraswap pools to the equivalent new @astroport_fi pools. Here's why 👇

Every project we've talked to so far during our hackathon is integrating @anchor_protocol in one way or another. Such a key primitive for Terra.

Thorchain is the first and best in its class, an entirely new design to solve the problem of cross-chain swaps. The increased risk of exploit that comes with new tech is hugely outweighed by the long term potential. The bumps along the way are all part of the process. $RUNE

When my colleagues pitched me on @THORChain over a year ago I was sceptical. Too much to build, will take too long, too much time for competitors to emerge... Today it’s live and I’m happy to have been proved wrong. Congrats to the team and all the $RUNE believers.

Deleted my LinkedIn account. End of an era.

Once @thorchain_org and @terra_money integrate IBC the gates are open for a whole host of trustless non-native synthetic assets to flow around the Cosmos ecosystem.

The LUNA community when someone goes short

They like the Luna

24hr volume on @astroport_fi is around $190m. This is the highest of all AMMs on @terra_money and if it was on Ethereum it would be 4th just behind Sushi.

1/ Nearly a year ago we put out a report which outlined our reasons for focusing on Cosmos. Since then Cosmos has struggled to reattract users/liquidity and many doubt whether it ever will. Let's look at why and what it will take to turn things around.

I had a convo recently with some bankers at Barclays to go through where all my money was. Had to explain what a USD stablecoin was and how I had deposited some into a protocol for 19% fixed-ish interest. All with depeg insurance. They were like WTF.

24hr volume now > $600m on @astroport_fi. Once properly shown on CoinGecko it'd be second in the world by volume after Uni v3 🚀

I really love the @THORChain streaming swaps feature. Splitting the trade up into infinitely small pieces over a sufficiently long timeframe mitigates slippage and value loss to arbs. A great example of app-chain customisability. The @THORSwap UX is also nice.

Dear @THORChain and @terra_money, please invent some incentives for me to lock my $RUNE and $LUNA for long periods. Good for both token value accrual and my sanity. Thanks 👍

Our goal should be that someone can go to Mars Protocol (or other dapps) and directly deposit/withdraw USD or EUR from/to their bank without even knowing what Terra is. Composable on and off ramps will be game changers for adoption.

Thanks to everyone who responded! I’m amazed at the level of interest. We will go away and figure out how to structure such a programme then aim to announce something here on Twitter in 4-6 weeks. Stay tuned!

0/ The Delphi Labs Cosmos Hackathon starts today and we want it to be the best hackathon Cosmos has ever seen. See below for dates, prize details and ecosystem partners.

Me explaining my @terra_money ecosystem farming strategy

We've been talking a lot internally about what makes a good chain to build on. Builders determine which ecosystems prosper. Seeing things through their eyes helps predict where the space will be in a couple of years. I've summarised into a thread to collect thoughts.

research

Kind of want to try Luna again but without the mistakes

All the assets I hold are doing fine during the recent panic. For this I thank their non-toxic communities, USD based dominant trading pairs and strong fundamentals 🙏 $RUNE $SOL $LUNA

It’s multichain. There are multiple chains. They coexist in a space undergoing explosive growth. No one is trying to kill Ethereum nor is that in any way feasible.

Payroll app which pays staff in $UST with the option for them to directly deposit in Anchor or elsewhere in the Terra ecosystem for nice yield. Nice idea from our hackathon which hints at the potential of this new financial ecosystem.

The main @THORChain Twitter account is probably the best project account in crypto. Always posting, always reposting, consistently every day for years. The THORChain community is one of the strongest in crypto and imo is in no small part due to whoever runs this account.

The @mars_protocol lockdrop is live! You have just under 5 days to deposit and lock $UST in the Red Bank in return for a share of 50M MARS (5% of supply). This ensures the MARS governance token is distributed to those most committed to being Mars users. lockdrop.marsprotocol.io/

Sometimes I look at DeFi protocols and think they’re overvalued but then I remember that actual financial professionals valued Coinbase at $100B

No shortage of bad takes about Thorchain today. Criticism is all well and good, but at least take the time to understand how the thing works.

It seems crazy to me that people have high 6 figure or 7 figure portfolios and make no investment into keeping themselves informed. Meanwhile @Delphi_Digital Institutional members have had access to the following:

When the price is going down but you understand the fundamentals

I’ve been deep in the trenches the last ~36 hours dealing with the Terra exploit where Astroport unfortunately caught a stray. Mostly I’ve spent my time working with people to try and figure out the attacker’s identity. It’s been pretty eye-opening what I’ve learnt about the process. It’s insane what a group of smart, motivated people can uncover. Not to give too many specifics but IP addreses, the attacker’s probable name, their likely location, links with other projects they must have had knowledge of, and so on. I would never have thought it was possible to get so much. There is an inspiring amount of goodwill in the community - large numbers very smart people willing to give up hours of their time to help sleuth, teams lending us their security specialists - it was amazing to see. So many smart people in Cosmos still. And the support we at Delphi Labs and Astroport received is deeply appreciated. Stealing $2.5m+ is a serious crime - many years in prison if caught. You’d have to be crazy to take this risk given how easy it is to slip in some hard to foresee way and leave a trace. Anyway, we are at a point where we believe we’ve identified the attacker(s) and will be going to law enforcement with what we’ve learnt. We’ll leave it to the professionals after then. All we really want are the assets back though. Astroport has published the address of a community multisig where the attacker can anonymously return the funds. I would suggest they do that. nitter.app/astroport_fi/status/18… Many thanks to Spaydh and the Neutron team, Rarma, Ray Raspberry, Philipp from ERIS, Jacob, LitBit, everyone at TFL, the Terra validators, Sunny, Jack and some teams which may want to remain unnamed. Plus of course the relentlessly unkillable Astroport chads.

Terra community when a stablecoin poll doesn’t have $UST as an option

Non-fragmented L1s (@solana @terra_money etc) will win over fragmented platforms (either sharded or requiring L1/L2 split) because designing for a fragmented platform is a headache that new devs will opt out of.

Been thinking a lot about agents recently - what the use cases are and what the impact will be to crypto. I see a lot of people saying they don't understand or don't agree with this narrative. So here are my thoughts.

0/ A lot of people have been asking us about how we at Delphi Labs are thinking about the future for @mars_protocol. A short thread summarising why we have chosen to deploy Mars on @osmosis and thoughts on the general architecture of Mars in this post-UST-collapse-world 👇

The thing new stablecoins consistently fail at but Terra did really well is bootstrapping the demand side with real apps.

They really like the Luna

Been working full time in crypto for 5 years and I still have no clue how to explain what I do to friends and family

The winners for the @terra_money hackathon we at @Delphi_Digital organised with @IDEOVC and @eventornado have been announced. Here’s why I think they’re big wins for Terra 👇

I predict the next generation of bank accounts will support both fiat and stables. Imagine being able to deposit fiat USD, USDC or UST and it all just counts towards your USD balance. You could transfer out via crypto or fiat rails. Surely only a matter of time.

DeFi still has a great chance of being the next generation’s financial system. The reasons you aped into this are not invalidated by a pullback.

zkEvms, Sui, Aptos, new Cosmos chains etc are great, but each new chain fragments the space further. Bridges and wallets struggle to keep up, leading to complexity increasing faster than it can be abstracted away.

1/ Yesterday Delphi Labs has published a report detailing our vision for DeFi, where we believe the space is headed and ultimately where we believe is the best place to focus our builder efforts. Quick thread with highlights and why we ultimately decided to build on Cosmos 👇

A common conversation with projects building on Terra atm: me: cool so when are you going to launch? project: most likely just after col-5 goes live me: nods

1/ One of the projects being incubated by @Delphi_Digital Labs we're most excited about is @astroport_fi - the successor to TerraSwap - designed to be a best in class AMM in every aspect from UX/UI through to community engagement and economic design

2/ Mars Protocol (@mars_protocol) is a money market for Terra assets built around a dynamic interest rate model designed by our team to improve on capital efficiency. Delphi big brains worked hard on this and will be releasing a paper detailing the model later this week.

Planning to do a hackathon where teams build something from a list of pre-determined ideas. What doesn’t exist on @terra_money that needs to exist?

Revolut style app which holds stablecoins and allows you to send to addresses on any supported chain (Solana, Terra, ETH) or any real world bank account with seamless conversion. I would like that as a next-gen neobank.

$UST’s buyer of last resort is LUNA + a large number of heavily invested funds and wealthy individuals with a strong interest in not letting it collapse.

I no longer believe this

Devs atm

Astroport has grown to nearly $400m in daily volume. According to CoinGecko that would rank it 7th globally, and it's only 2 months old.

I predict the next “wars” will be cross chain bridges vying for adoption of their version of wrapped assets.

Super impressed with how the Terra community came together to stop anchor’s prop 18. YES was initially winning but after online debate it turned into an overwhelming NO. Love to see genuine decentralised governance in action.

I'm very disappointed in how much of a 180 I've done on Trump because he's good for crypto. I thought I was better than this.

2/ If you have a lot of time and are good at analysing then data providers can add a lot of value. @nansen_ai @glassnode @MessariCrypto @skewdotcom and others are good and range from free to ~$2k/month. We at @Delphi_Digital subscribe to most of these.

12/ Lastly we are working with an unannounced project that aims to change the way you interact with and manage your Terra portfolio. All we can show for now is the logo, but they are working hard to build their MVP and unveil in the coming weeks, so look out for updates 👀

XDEFI wallet embracing the Terra ecosystem and bundling select defi usecases directly into the UI. GMI walletified.

0/ A thread on the bull case for @xdefi_wallet 👇

Alpha leak. We're working with Suberra to enable recurring @Delphi_Digital subscriptions paid with $UST 👀

Bullish $RUNE

Do you think BSC will still be second place this time next year? Me neither.

1/ Today we publish our crypto x AI thesis. This reflects months of deep diving into the space developing our understanding of the different sectors and determining which have merit. See below for a summary thread, or read the full article here.

AMMs are the most basic primitive of DeFi, but those siloed on a single chain have limited utility in a multichain world. @thorchain_org is perfectly positioned to be one of the main primitives of this new financial system, with RUNE as a reserve asset.

Building liquidity for the weUSDC/UST pair in Astroport would make it the cheapest and most convenient way into UST from other stables. Bridge USDC via @wormholecrypto and swap via Astroport. No more need for CEXs. No more crazy Curve gas fees. This needs to be incentivised.

We need all the experienced React developers. There is so much to build. Dm me if you like React, @terra_money and want to build cool things like @astroport_fi and @mars_protocol with us at Delphi Labs.

Some facts about he @asteroidxyz (and $ROIDS) launch: * only about 10 people knew about it prior to launch * no big premints or team allocations or VCs * first people to see the announcement were the ones who got to mint The fairest launch of anything for a while imo.

I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of new defi protocol designs enabled by cheap transactions and fast block times

The infra @astroport_fi was using struggled to handle the huge influx of users from @Injective_ @SeiNetwork and @Neutron_org Astroport is now using new beefy nodes for all three chains so the user experience should be vastly improved If you still see issues pls lmk ✦

Astroport's @Injective_ outpost is doing nearly $10m in volume off just $1.4m in liquidity. Some crazy APRs there for the degenerates among you.

DeFi ecosystems will not thrive without a great AMM at their core. That's why we at @Delphi_Digital Labs worked hard together with @IDEOVC and @atticlab_it to design an AMM that we believe fits the needs of the burgeoning @terra_money ecosystem. Short thread 👇

This is another important step in the adoption of $UST. But UST is not yet considered by FTX equivalent to "USD" as USDC, BUSD etc are in terms of collateral value. As trust in the peg and stability reserves keep building, perhaps that'll be the next step.

0/ Been diving pretty deep into AI recently, trying to figure out the overlaps with crypto that make sense. Verifiable inference is one you'll hear about more and more as the crypto x AI narrative inevitably grows stronger. I'll explain why I think it's valuable.

Gensler is like the final boss for defi

The @Delphi_Digital research machine is looking for a dedicated CTO to take over from me. Pushing the boundaries of using tech and data to improve crypto research is awesome and I can personally recommend. Should be talented technically, operational and a bit of a crypto degen.

In anticipation of the @Neutron_org launch, we are proposing to the Astral Assembly that @astroport_fi is deployed to Neutron shortly after genesis Given the synergistic nature of L1 and AMM, we also propose that additional provisions are made to align incentives Thread 👇

The @terra_money team gains an important and timely new addition

The men:women ratio in this space is pretty embarrassing

It’s happening - @nic_carter vs @TrustlessState

Delphi Labs is looking for lunatics or DeFi enthusiasts who are also senior developers with a background in React to help us build. We offer interesting work alongside a talented team. Decent monthly rate + ownership in what you work on. Looking to start asap. DMs are open 🙏

Talking to crypto people in Dubai, and while many seem disillusioned with the space, absolutely everyone agrees that AI agents will become mass adopters of crypto rails

The (highly unscientific) results are in. The most requested ideas to be built on @terra_money are: 1. Gnosis Safe like multisig 2. Self-repaying loans Alchemix style 3. Snapshot voting @kinetic_money is already working on #2. Let's built 1 and 3 in a hackathon! Stay tuned...

Astroport Protocol Foundation is hiring. The launch of Asteroid Protocol far exceeded our expectations, with 1.3m total inscriptions, including 2k tokens and 9k content inscriptions in 3 days. The team is now v. busy and seeks full-stack and smart contract developers to help 👇

There’s so much happening in crypto right now. My entire job is just talking to smart people about crypto and I still feel inadequately informed.

Feeling like I don’t have enough $RUNE. How have I allowed this to happen? I’ve been deeply involved in this project for months. ngmi

3/ We’re co-incubating the Mars team with our friends at @IDEOVC who have designed for this imo the best UX in DeFi. Look out for a teaser of that on @mars_protocol soon and if you haven’t already check out the litepaper: mars-protocol.medium.com/mar…