We’re only in the second week of 2023, but the demo days have already begun as the founders try to keep momentum alive in the ever-changing crypto market.

Beacon, a web3-focused early-stage accelerator program, launched last year and its core cohort just graduated. Teams from the first cohort, known as Cohort 0, pitched their ideas Tuesday during a demo day, covered exclusively by TechCrunch.

“For Cohort 0, we talked to over 1,000 projects to finish at 15 companies in Cohort 0 with 13 graduating on our Demo Day,” Sandeep Nailwal, senior contributor to Beacon and co-founder of Polygon, told TechCrunch. “With the current application rate for Cohort 1, we plan to land at a similar 1% acceptance rate.”

The three-month program runs twice a year and accepts 15-20 applicants for its fall and spring cohorts.

“We feel like Cohort 0 is our Beacon MVP,” Nailwal said. “So for this cohort, we picked our favorite teams through calls with founders coming from our networks.”

Mentors include Jack Lu, CEO and Co-Founder of Magic Eden; a handful of venture capitalists; Rob Behnke, co-founder of Halborn; Brendan Farmer, co-director of Polygon Zero; Dan Kim, vice president of business development and listing at Coinbase; and Miles Anthony, CEO and Co-Founder of Decentral Games, to name a few.

For the next cohort, there will be a standard investment of $250,000, with an $8 million post-money valuation from Beacon for each company in the program, Nailwal noted. In Cohort 0, the investments were made on a case-by-case basis as the team refined its process, he added.

Beacon is “chain-agnostic,” meaning most of the Cohort 0 teams were building cross-chain apps, Nailwal said. However, Ethereum topped the list of most teams that are based on that blockchain. Of the 13 companies, there were 29 founders in nine countries and 13 cities, Kenzi Wang, a senior contributor to Beacon and co-founder of Symbolic Capital, said during the demo day.

The startups focused on a variety of crypto sub-sectors, such as gaming, infrastructure, decentralized lending and lending, and developer tools, to name a few. Almost all of the startups in the cohort are at seed stage, with the exception of one company, Community Gaming, in Serie A.

Here are the details behind the 13 startups in Cohort 0:

Company name: Arcana

• What it does: Web3 developer toolkit
• Founders: Mayur Relekar, Aravindh Kumar
• Stage: Seed
• The Pitch: Arcana wants to help complement the developer tech stack with tools to help build secure decentralized applications (dApps). Its main tools include user authentication, data storage in its decentralized network, and access control. The platform aims to provide developers building apps on “almost any chain” with the ability to take advantage of its services and tools.

Company name: blinkmoon

• What it does: Game development studio
• Founders: Hugh Behroozy, Hajeir Mazinani
• Stage: Seed
• The pitch: Blinkmoon is building an independent game development studio to focus on the growing web3 sector. Prior to this, members of his team helped create the visuals for “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Game of Thrones,” and also worked on game franchises like League of Legends: Wild Rift, NBA, Dead Rising, and Rainbow Six. , to name a few.

Company name: Chapter X

• What it does: Web3 event experience
• Founders: Chase Guo
• Stage: Seed
• The Pitch: ChapterX is a web3 event experience platform that aims to give organizers the ability to transform their events into unique experiences. The startup offers options to engage attendees through physical events or customizable virtual worlds in the metaverse with aspects like decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance or GameFi. Users can also turn their 2D NFTs into 3D avatars through its redesign system and discover new worlds and join communities through its network.

Company name: collection

• What it does: GameFi ecosystem
• Founders: Abhay Aggarwal
• Stage: Seed
• The Pitch: Colexion is a card-based GameFi ecosystem that aims to bring Web 2.0 gaming to the web3 ecosystem through fantasy-focused content. Their system, Colexion Core, provides a number of services like minting, markets, bridges, wallets, and more to help traditional games navigate the web3 world. The company focuses on the Asia-Pacific region and has more than 15 million active users in more than 10 countries, according to its website. Colexion is backed by Polygon, Brevan Howard, Jump Capital, Symbolic Capital, Firestarter and GSR.

Company name: community games

• What it does: Esports platform
• Founders: Chris Gonsalves
• Stage: Series A
• The Pitch: Community Gaming aims to be an all-in-one esports competition platform that offers infrastructure to players in the industry. The platform is supported by Ethereum and Solana based blockchain payment technologies and provides players, organizers and game developers with tools to create, facilitate and participate in esports tournaments. It also provides users with the ability to monetize their game by completing quests, a daily content engine for earning, and game discovery.

Company name: Cubist

• What it does: Web3 Developer Tools and Framework
• Founders: Ann Stefan, Deian Stefan, Riad Wahby, Fraser Brown
• Stage: Seed
• The Pitch: Cubist is a provider of developer tools and infrastructure that aims to bring today’s security and software engineering practices to web3 developers. Its toolset focuses on providing more secure options for developers to easily build, test, and deploy to multi-chain and cross-chain dApps. Its founders include a former fintech COO and computer science professors from Carnegie Mellon University and UC San Diego. Team members have spent their careers adapting security to real-world systems and have collectively published more than 80 research articles on related topics such as computer systems, programming languages, security, and cryptography.

Company name: fast lane

• What it does: MEV solutions for Ethereum-based blockchains and accumulations
• Founders: Alex Watts, Jordan Hagan
• Stage: Seed
• The Pitch: The FastLane protocol focuses on generating revenue for validators, increasing the effectiveness of algorithmic merchants, and reducing stress on network participants when overwhelmed by redundant transactions without the need to install or manage custom software on the validation nodes. The protocol aims to reduce transaction spam and improve the overall health of the Ethereum network by monetizing propagation bottlenecks in the layer 2 blockchain polygon and distributing the rewards to the validators involved.

Company name: meta apes

• What it does: Web3 game
• Founders: Taylor Shim, Nicholas Carr
• Stage: Seed
• The Pitch: Meta Apes is a free to play, win-win web3 mobile game built on the BNB Application Sidechain (BAS). Players have the ability to build their own cities and communities while competing and exploring others to win the “race to space”. The game aims to combine traditional gameplay elements like massively multiplayer online (MMO) strategies and web3 elements like in-game currencies. The team has worked at places like Ubisoft, Gameloft, Zynga, AppLovin, and Epic.

Company name: mystical elk

• What he does: Web3 game developer
• Founders: Mike Levine
• Stage: Seed
• The Plot: Mystic Moose is a web3 platform, game studio, and publisher formed by a team of gaming veterans who have worked at Activision, LucasArts, and Electronic Arts. Their first game, Planet Mojo, was built on their Sumatra scalable backend platform and is a browser-based, interconnected game server. Its automatic chess game, Mojo Melee, is currently in alpha testing and plans to be fully released in the first quarter of this year on browsers and mobile devices. The studio is backed by Animoca Brands, Republic Crypto, and Polygon Studios, among others.

Company name: billion

• What it does: Web3 infrastructure
• Founders: Alex Page, Andrew Yeoh, Andrew Masanto
• Stage: Seed
• The Pitch: Nillion is a web3 infrastructure startup focused on securing data storage, compute, and fragmentation on the Internet. “Nillion is a deep tech infrastructure project,” Andrew Yeoh, the company’s founding chief marketing officer, told TechCrunch. “While blockchains decentralize finance, Nillion aims to decentralize everything else and the rest of the data.” The founders include former employees of Uber, Indiegogo, and Hedera Hashgraph, as well as executives from Coinbase and Nike. The company raised more than $20 million in December 2022 from more than 150 investors in a “conscious decision” to avoid concentrated ownership, Nillion CEO Alex Page said in a statement.

Company name: davos protocol

• What it does: Stable Asset Lending Protocol
• Founders: Varun Satyam, Julian Hayward, Filipe Gonçalves
• Stage: Seed
• The pitch: The Davos Protocol is home to its stablecoin, DAVOS, which is stabilized by its monetary policy balancing yield generation and price stability on a weekly basis by leveraging liquid equity, according to its website. It gives users the ability to borrow DAVOS using liquid staking tokens as collateral. Users can also provide stablecoin asset pairs to provide liquidity, farm performance, and earn rewards. The team aims to promote blockchain technology into mainstream adoption by incentivizing borrowers and participants through its protocol. Its strategic partners include Polygon and Ankr.

Company name: time swap

• What it does: Decentralized lending and lending protocol
• Founders: Ameeth Devadas, Harshita Singh, Ricsson Ngo
• Stage: Seed
• The pitch: Timeswap is a decentralized lending and lending platform, as well as an automated market maker (AMM) protocol powered by Polygon. Its key features include flexible interest rates and collateral factors so that users can have the flexibility to decide their risk-return profile, as well as allowing them to create any Ethereum-based ERC20 token pool by providing adequate liquidity. Since its launch in August 2020, the platform has done more than $4 million in lending volume, lending, and liquidity on its protocol without any token incentives, according to an August post.

Company name: ylida

• What it does: decentralized protocol for communication with the wallet
• Founders: Ignat Shapkin, Kirill Zubkov, Danila Simonov
• Stage: Seed
• The pitch: Ylide is a decentralized protocol for wallet-to-wallet communication that enables multi-chain messaging, data storage in smart contracts, and end-to-end encryption. It also has its own email client, as well as tools for developers to integrate communication features into their projects, “as easily as building a Lego game,” the team said.