The first batch of Consensys Fellowship students reports in, observing the creative ideas in the Web3 tools track

Author: Peng SUN, Foresight News

Consensys announced the launch of the Consensys Fellowship program on September 20, aimed at supporting startups related to MetaMask SDK, MetaMask Snaps, and Linea. Startups joining the program have the opportunity to receive investments of up to $1.5 million, funded by Consensys Mesh and Tachyon. Consensys hopes that the companies joining will focus on three areas: scalability to make Web3 more accessible and diverse in functionality, tools to simplify the development process, and L2 solutions for Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains.

Just last Tuesday, Consensys announced the first 16 companies selected for the Fellowship program. As expected by Consensys, these startups primarily focus on product tools:

Common Ground

Common Ground is a Web3 community platform that supports chat, meetings, forums, and coordination among ecosystems. Common Ground supports multi-chain, decentralized identity, token control, and NFTs, allowing users to log in with X accounts, email, and cryptocurrency wallets, and after logging in, they can bind their own X accounts.

The user experience of the product is similar to Discord, but it provides blog-like features within the community, allowing community creators to publish content in separate sections without affecting the communication atmosphere within the community.

Florian Glatz, co-founder and CEO of Common Ground, is the Vice President of the European Crypto Initiative and a lawyer in the cryptocurrency field.

Butter

Butter is a DAO governance tool that has launched a DAO governance system called Molten. Molten is designed to address the risks of voting power centralization in DAO governance by creating incentives that make corruption unprofitable.

Butter believes that current DAO governance faces two core issues: corruption and governance attacks. Corruption can lead to a small group of interests holding a large number of votes, harming the long-term value of the DAO for their own benefit; governance attacks occur when vulnerabilities in governance mechanisms are exploited by attackers to steal funds from the DAO.

Molten provides a new governance system that allows "representatives" in a DAO to create a delegation contract for a proposal, enabling voters holding governance tokens to deposit their tokens into the contract to delegate their voting power to the "representative." This delegation contract is called Molten Pot, which requires the DAO to set a threshold for it. When the number of delegated votes exceeds a certain threshold, the contract will be activated, while similar contracts will be suspended.

The Molten model ensures that only one "representative" can represent the interests of the majority of voters for a given DAO proposal, and the DAO will deposit a certain amount of rewards into the contract to incentivize voters to actively participate in governance.

Voters can receive an equivalent amount of mToken representing their share of the governance tokens deposited into the contract when they deposit governance tokens. If the "representative" successfully executes the voting task, voters will share the rewards deposited in the contract based on their shares.

Butter believes that adopting the Molten system can concentrate a large number of dispersed votes into the hands of "representatives" through incentives, thus preventing manipulation of votes by a small group holding a large number of votes.

Bonadocs

Bonadocs simplifies the integration and collaboration of smart contracts, streamlining workflows, documentation, and smart contract integration.

Tezoro

Tezoro aims to address situations where users cannot log into their wallets or lose control of their wallets due to unforeseen circumstances. Users will set a target address to which assets will be transferred in such cases, which can be executed by the user themselves or another wallet address, or assets will be transferred when pre-set conditions occur (such as no transfers or interactions with contracts for 30 consecutive days). All actions are executed by smart contracts.

Denota

Denota provides a payment solution that utilizes NFTs to support the withdrawal of payments, aiming to allow payers to retract funds in the event of fraud.

Denota's solution includes two models: the underwriting model and the collateral model.

In the underwriting model, the payer pays a certain "premium" after making a payment and generates a "nota" NFT contract containing risk parameter information, which is underwritten by a "reserve pool" provided by liquidity providers. If no refund occurs within the time limit, nothing happens. If fraud occurs and the payer needs to recover funds, the payer can sell the NFT to the fund pool at a certain discount rate, with the discount level depending on the risk of the transaction itself.

In the collateral model, the payer will also generate a "nota" NFT contract after making a payment, but this NFT contract will lock assets equivalent to the payment amount. If a refund occurs, the locked assets will be fully returned to the payer to ensure maximum protection for the payer. This model includes a "secondary market" for discounted purchases of all NFTs. If no refund occurs, the secondary market fund pool will receive all funds after the lock period ends; if a refund occurs, the fund pool will lose the funds used to purchase the NFT.

Toaster Finance

Toaster Finance is a one-stop DeFi platform that allows users to perform cross-chain transactions and invest in DeFi protocols to generate returns without switching between multiple applications.

PADO

PADO allows users to prove their off-chain data in a real and privacy-protecting manner and further create data proofs for third-party sharing and access. For example, users can prove to GameFi protocols that they are advanced players in MOBA games without revealing personal information. PADO employs secure protocols like MPC-TSL for privacy and data integrity in internet communication and the IZK protocol using zero-knowledge proofs to achieve these functionalities.

Noves

Noves is a blockchain data tool with products including Translate API and Foresight API. The Translate API helps users understand the transaction content supported by protocols on-chain, while the Foresight API helps understand the impact of unconfirmed transactions. Noves is characterized by eliminating the need for developers to repeatedly develop when obtaining transaction content on each chain, instead utilizing Noves' standardized tools to obtain transaction information across all supported chains.

zkUSD

zkUSD is a zk-SNARK-based stablecoin project that allows users to collateralize NEON to mint zkUSD and use zkUSD to enhance transaction privacy. Additionally, zkUSD's products include the compliant privacy trading settlement layer Vala, which is a Layer 3 solution presented through DApp, allowing users to conduct privacy transactions and use zero-knowledge proof technology to prove the legitimacy of funds without revealing the complete transaction history.

Epoch Protocol

Epoch Protocol is a trading automation solution that provides a unified platform for automating Web3 trading components through account abstraction, whether based on on-chain events, off-chain triggers, or time-based operations. Epoch offers a pluggable solution that supports batch processing of multiple transactions to accommodate diverse needs. Additionally, Epoch enhances security through on-chain verification.

Greg

Greg provides a convenient Web3 wallet login experience, allowing users to log in to their wallets simply by entering their email and obtaining a verification code, without the need to generate mnemonic phrases or other complex steps. Projects including CoinLivre, NForests, and SoulPrime have adopted Greg's solution.

Taigalabs

Taigalabs has a very simple official website, where team members state that Taigalabs is a computational technology research and development group currently focused on exploring verifiable computation, particularly in creating ZK proofs on the client side.

Relayer

Relayer is a Web3 advertising infrastructure that helps projects provide customized rewards based on users' on-chain behavior to achieve better marketing results.

Holder

Holder is a Web3 CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and marketing automation platform, with products including Web3 forms that support both on-chain and off-chain data, audience segmentation based on on-chain and off-chain data, and tools for automatically pushing updates to the community.

Xtremely

Xtremely optimizes trading paths and arbitrage through its "Dynamic Graph - as - a - Service" tool. The project does not list an official website.

Caddie

Caddie is a trading aggregator that aggregates liquidity from both DEX and CEX, aiming to provide the best execution price for trades. Supported DEX aggregators include LI.FI, KyberSwap, 1inch, OpenOcean, Matcha, etc., while supported CEXs include Binance, Kraken, KuCoin, and others.