Compiled: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

a16zcrypto's fourth crypto startup accelerator program (CSX 04) will be launched in San Francisco this week.

CSX helps early-stage startups leverage blockchain technology to accelerate development and product market fit, providing the expertise, guidance and support startups need to build ambitious products in various industries.

In the next two months, the founders of these companies will receive first-hand guidance and support from the a16z crypto investment and operations team. We connect the founders to capital, industry experts in the a16z network, and a leading web3 team. a16z CSX also invests at least $500,000 in every accepted company.

The founders of CSX 04 come from all over the world and come to San Francisco: Canada, France, Germany, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

The following are companies participating in CSX 04:

Ambient:

Ambient is a SVM-compatible proof-of-work L1 that provides hyper-large-scale validation inference on a 600B+ parameter model and its fine tuning.

Ambient's Proof of Hyper-Optimization Logic (PoL) consensus handles LLM operations 100 times faster than traditional systems. Ambient has escaped the paralysis of the model market, focusing miners, users and agents on a growing LLM giant. Ambient’s miners are not just validators, but participants. Ambient is characterized by censorship resistance and privacy protection, no rate limits and no bans. It will not be silently downgraded or coerced, nor will it compete with your business's agent as a platform, nor will it use every query as an ideology touchstone. As a full fork for Solana, Ambient replaces PoS with PoW while still running at the full speed of Solana, it provides the Solana development and economical convenience you’d expect, enhanced by state-of-the-art chain-accessible base model and other new features.

Cambrian:

Cambrian is an AI infrastructure protocol that converts on-chain and off-chain data into quickly accessible financial intelligence. Cambrian's functionality is powered by a decentralized validator network that indexes blockchain data while extracting off-chain data at high speed. In an era of unprecedented agency growth, Cambrian is on a revolutionary path to better meet human and agency needs. Cambrian’s focus is first on the breadth of data and access speed, then on enhanced verifiability, new data types, enhanced sovereignty, and more.

Inco Network:

Incois a modular confidential computing layer 1 blockchain and general confidential layer for Ethereum and other networks, leveraging a combination of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), zero-knowledge (ZK), multi-party computing (MPC), and trusted execution environment (TEE) to achieve composable and actionable confidential state. We have enhanced the capabilities of existing blockchains to enable them to write private smart contracts and perform computations on top of encrypted data without decryption.

This innovation unlocks a wide range of use cases with confidential components such as card games, DIDs, private voting, dark pools, and more, paving the way for a new era of possibility.

KYD Labs:

KYD Labs is a live event ticketing platform, which "is changing the American music industry during a period when traditional ticketing giants are obviously unsatisfied. Currently, KYD Labs serves more than 500,000 fans. As an infrastructure, KYD Labs helps music venues such as LPR turn advertising spend into efficient ticket sales. This integration can enable performance venues and artists to receive up to 10 times in terms of tickets, merchandise and music advertising spending."

Launcher Capital:

Build the next generation of artificial intelligence agents through gamification and blockchain technology, allowing multiple agents to interact, learn and develop in complex environments. Implement game rules among multiple agents to achieve autonomous gaming and sudden behavior. Enables artificial intelligence agents to carry out independent economic activities in a decentralized environment.

Mahojin:

Mahojin is a Web3-based AI image mixing layer. Users can instantly generate professional-quality images by mixing on any third-party application. Mahojin aims to create “GitHub” for AI model creators and dataset developers, with its platform enabling intellectual property tracking and paying original contributors to models and datasets.

ORO:

A decentralized intelligent platform for unlocking private data for cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

Toji:

Create an on-chain popular market for videos.

ZAR:

Build a decentralized cash-to-stablecoin platform for emerging markets. ZAR can help find nearby merchants, safely and conveniently exchange cash into digital currency, and is a bridge between the cash economy and Web3, accelerating the adoption of stablecoins.