L2 Accelerator Summary
On 11th April, the L2 Accelerator came to an exciting conclusion with a pitching session that allowed the participating teams to showcase their innovative projects. The chosen teams had been working diligently in the accelerator programme, and their hard work culminated in the opportunity to present their solutions to their cohort, mentors, and representatives from the sponsoring companies — Boba Network, AltLayer, zkSync, and Metis.
The L2 Accelerator programme, with a focus on Layer-2 scaling solutions, provided a unique platform for the participants to develop their projects utilizing cutting-edge technologies. The program offered a diverse range of resources and guidance to support the teams in their journey towards building high-quality solutions for the future of web3.
The L2 Accelerator programme provided an invaluable opportunity for the participating teams to engage with experts in the field and receive critical feedback on their projects.
About the L2 Accelerator
The accelerator was the second step in a pipeline, created to support engineers through the entire lifecycle in web3. Prior to this, we had a Layer Hack focused on building Layer 2 solutions.
During the accelerator, the teams had the opportunity to work on their projects, all the while supported by our team through weekly meetings and 1–1 mentorship. This way, each team got the support and feedback necessary to build a project, not just from us, but from other participating teams as well. The eighth and final workshop was the pitch day where the teams presented their projects.
Accelerator Structure
- Lasted 8 weeks
- Weekly workshops on building your project
- Dedicated 1–1 mentorship meeting
- Expectation to build intensely, but not full-time, for those 8 weeks
- Ended with a Pitch Day and opportunities for follow-on funding
Breakdown of the Accelerator Workshops
On top of the Kick-Off Event and the final Pitch Day, the accelerator consisted of 6 other sessions:
- Building a Community with Braden Apana and Estevan Vilar (zkSync)
- Fundraising with Anthony Beaumont (Encode Club)
- How to Build a Decentralised Autonomous Company with Pavel Sinelnikov (Metis)
- How to Market with Curtis Schlaufman (Boba Network)
- AMA with Amrit Kumar (AltLayer)
- Pitch Preparation
Building a Community
Braden Apana and Estevan Vilar went over the process of building a community. Based on their own experience in building a community for zkSync, they presented the key factors that got zkSync to where it is today. They talked about the values of a community in the web3 space, the learnings, which tools to utilise, and how the future looks in the field of web3 communities.
Fundraising
Anthony Beaumont, the CEO of Encode, explained what is fundraising and why not every start-up needs it, presented the principles of fundraising and talked about how does fundraising look like in the web3 space. To top it all off, he gave some practical tips on how to approach and successfully fundraise.
How to Build a Decentralised Autonomous Company
Pavel Sinelnikov gave a presentation on DAO Working Groups. He talked about the current state of DAOs, and how they work and operate. He presented the issues and some downsides of the current models of DAOs and whether can Decentralised Autonomous Companies solve these issues.
How to Market
Curtis Schlaufman did a high-level overview of how to properly market a product in the space. He talked about the evolution of web3 marketing, goal setting for success, early-stage customer acquisition and engagement, marketing on a budget, traditional marketing metrics and the unique challenges of web3 marketing!
Amrit Kumar AMA
As a part of this accelerator and exclusively for this cohort, we hosted an AMA with Amrit Kumar, the COO of AltLayer. He talked about approaches to scalability and on-chain gaming, data limitations on FlashLayer, AltLayer’s role on DeFi Verticals, research and fundraising and much more!
Pitch Preparation
This was the final workshop before the final pitch and it was intended to help our accelerator participants practise presenting their project live.
Projects
Echo Hold
Echo Hold is a web3-integrated 2D top-down RPG game built using Unity Engine. In Echo Hold, the player explores a castle called Echo Hold, which contains echoes of the real world (the crypto market).
Paymasters.io
They are leveraging on native account abstraction support in zkSync to provide the infrastructure from which users can access and use paymasters, basically being able to opt-in to any paymaster of choice and also to provide a means for institutions/dApps to noticeably propagate this feature to their users without boxing a suit of SDKs distinctively.
Tevaera
Tevaera ecosystem is made up of two core offerings:
1) Teva Games offers exciting, fair, and socially-connected adventure games set in a naturistic world with cross-NFT characters. Teva Run, their first multiplayer game, is all set to go viral with zkSync 2.0 mainnet.
2) Their on-chain gaming infrastructure, powered by Teva Core, is the first-ever multiplayer game framework for on-chain games. Teva Core is smart and provides a “plug & play” service for gaming studios on EVM chains.
FunsGiving
They have built a platform that simplifies the process of giving to charity and claiming deductions. The platform includes a landing page and MVP features such as a dashboard to track contributions and a user interface for projects to create split contracts. Their goal is to onboard charities, projects, and artists to provide a seamless user experience and invigorate web3 charitable giving.
Galaxia Studios
Galaxia Studios is an innovation hub and web3 gaming studio focused on fully on-chain gaming and dynamic NFTs.
Spacemeet
It’s a cutting-edge web3 native virtual events platform designed to revolutionize the virtual event experience. Their platform provides scalable, innovative, and optimized solutions for conducting large-scale virtual events such as conferences, hackathons, workshops, meetups, and more.
Another World
Another World is an experiment for exploring new usages of playable NFTs, web3 community engagement, and gaming. They are currently having internal tests with blue-chip NFT holders from BAYC, Azuki, and CloneX.
Vyper Protocol
They are building infrastructure and application stack to create, trade and settle on-chain derivatives in minutes. The first use-case is building a hybrid RFQ/CLOB-style DEX where users can post buy and sell orders on a large variety of derivatives and assets (crypto, commodities, FX, stocks and more) and get access to instant liquidity provided via RFQs. They built an extremely efficient clearing mechanism that can be used to set up a new derivative market very quickly, bringing the operational cost of such operations from several months to less than 60 seconds (>99.99% improvement).
About Encode Club
Encode Club is a web3 education community learning and building together through fantastic programmes with the leading protocols in the space. Together we organize programmes like education series, bootcamps, hackathons, and accelerators both online and in person. We then help our community get jobs and funding for projects and startups.
Questions
If you have any questions, please email: general@encode.club
