Protocol Village: Tate Berenbaum Launches ‘AO Ventures,’ With $35M for Arweave Development

April 11: Tate Berenbaum, who reportedly raised $30 million while still a teenager for crypto startup Community Labs, has launched of AO Ventures, a 10-week incubator program dedicated to fostering development on Arweave and AO, according to a message from Berenbaum. “Over $35 million in capital has already been committed to the investment pool. The program will start in April and culminate in a Demo Day in June.” AO is described on the Community Labs website as a “hyper parallel computer” with a core objective of “merging the benefits of trust minimization with the speed and traditional computing environments.” The Arweave network is for “permanent information storage,” according to its website. (AR)

April 11: QED Protocol, the world’s first zk-native blockchain protocol, together with StarkWare, zkLink, Mina Protocol, O(1) Labs, announced the launch of the L2O Consortium, a group of projects and protocols committed to bringing Bitcoin’s native security, internet scale, and interoperability to applications and Layer 2 solutions. According to a press release: “The consortium is developing reference implementations, tools, and resources for developers looking to build DApps or deploy Layer 2s on top of Bitcoin and enable trustless interoperability between applications by coordinating standards across solutions, leveraging ordinals and zero-knowledge proofs to bridge the technical gaps that previously hampered smart contract-like functionality on Bitcoin.” The reference implementations are here in the project documentation.

April 11: DLC.Link, describing itself as the “self-wrapping trustless bridge to DeFi,” announced the release of dlcBTC, “a safer wrapped Bitcoin alternative, built utilizing discreet log contracts (DLCs).” According to the team: “DLC.Link created a trustless bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum, transforming Bitcoin’s role in DeFi. DlcBTC represents a significant advancement in this transformation, allowing users to seamlessly utilize bitcoin across the Ethereum ecosystem while retaining full ownership of their assets. The newly launched dlcBTC enables depositors to engage in trading, lending and hedging while maintaining self-sovereignty.”

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