Happy holidays everyone! We’ll be keeping this one short but wanted to drop just a little bit of end-of-year cheer before we wrapped up annual operations here at dlab HQ.

Despite macro-economic woes, the last couple months have been busier than ever for us and our portfolio companies, many of whom (Tesseract! Ithil! Light! API3! Catallact! WeatherXM!) we got to spend some quality face-to-face time last month during ETH Lisbon, FIL, and Solana Breakpoint. It’s always nice to have the opportunity to catch up with legitimately amazing people irl — preferably over a beverage or a meal — and we hope all of you will be able to spend some gratifying irl-time with family and friends this holiday season.

Welcome to the Family

Let’s start things off with two new teams that are joining the dlab portfolio. You’ll hear more about these guys soon. Promise! 😉

Meshlink enables web3 teams to better understand how their users are interacting with their blockchain applications. We like to think of them as Google Analytics or Heap Analytics specifically tailored to the needs of smart contract devs.

Pr3sence is a web3-native blockchain-based advertising and content discovery service, exclusively leveraging on-chain data and machine learning-based recommendations. No PII (!) and no cookies needed.

Portfolio Highlights

Contango: Bringing expirables to DeFi

Contango’s long-awaited beta is live and you can now trade the very first #DeFi expirables on Arbitrum! Crypto now has an alternative to on-chain perpetuals to avoid funding fees. Want to better understand what the differences are? We’ve got you covered.

Light Protocol: Privacy and Compliance infrastructure for Solana

Fade Mint just launched privacy-preserving minting on Solana, powered by and in collaboration with Light Protocol. Their first collection to pioneer the space will be @NomadsNFT_. Wanna get a white list spot, while exploring one of the slickest applications of Light’s privacy SDK? You know what to do.

Composable Finance: Trustless cross-chain bridging

Picasso’s launch sequence has officially been initiated. Release 1 is out and PICA is now claimable if you participated in the parachain crowdloan. The team is currently focused on delivering Release 2, including the upcoming debut of their Pablo DEX. There’s a lot more brewing as well, including some absolutely clutch CosmWasm dev tools. Don’t know where to start? Peep this awesome overview they published.

API3: The decentralized first-party oracle network

Oracle Extractable Value (OEV) is a paradigm shift for on-chain oracles. The API3 team has been heads-down for the last couple months working to make this vision a reality. Meanwhile, they’re also continuing to deploy existing services to new blockchains, including Arbitrum and Aurora, where developers can now tap into QRNG for smart contract applications.

Diwala: Secure issuance & verification of digital credentials

Diwala’s SaaS platform for credential issuance and verification has undergone a major overhaul with the launch of v3.0. Want to check it out? There’s no longer any mobile application download required; simply log in using your existing contact information (or sign up!) at app.diwala.io

Milkomeda: EVM interoperability and L2 scalability

Since launching the A1 Rollup on Algorand back in October, the Milkomeda team has been building momentum by onboarding DeFi protocols, bridges, innovative games (with stateful NFTs!), and other dApps to the EVM-expanded Cardano and Algorand communities. To bolster that effort, they recently launched the Milkomeda dApp store, which helps new users from those L1 blockchains explore the expanded ecosystem. We’re looking forward to this work being integrated directly into Flint wallet in the future for an even more seamless experience.

That’s all for now. We’ve got some big announcements coming up in Q1 and really can’t wait to share them with you. In the meantime, thanks (as always) for your continued support, and have a prosperous and happy new year. See you in 2023!

That’s all for now. We’ve got some big announcements coming up in Q1 and really can’t wait to share them with you. In the meantime, thanks (as always) for your continued support, and have a prosperous and happy new year. See you in 2023!