Crypto Startup Ideas
Qiao Wang
Below are some crypto startup ideas and themes we at Alliance are excited about. They are updated regularly to reflect our latest thinking.
This document serves two purposes:
- To encourage you to apply to join our community and to get funded, if you are working on one of these ideas.
- To inspire you, if you are not sure what to build.
By no means you should feel that building something on this list is a requirement to be admitted to Alliance. In the past, we have backed many ideas that caught us by surprise.
We are slowly but firmly moving up the stack.
A few years ago we did not have cheap and fast blockchains, proper on/off-ramps, a critical mass of users onchain, and many other key ingredients. Today we do. Many applications that weren't possible a few years ago are now possible.
We have also learned that crypto is exceptional at the following things:
- Making payments
- Creating and trading markets
- Coordinating activities
In these veins, we are excited about the following areas of innovation.
Stablecoin/Fintech
Stablecoins are by far the biggest non-speculative use case of crypto.
The most obvious application of stablecoins is fast, cheap, and global payment. Here stablecoins represents a 10x improvement over traditional solutions. We don’t believe payment startups should compete with the likes of Venmo or Revolut, at least not as their first go-to-market. Instead, they should identify and focus on underserved user segments such as traditionally underbanked industries (often taboo industries), or in emerging markets where fiat debasement is more prevalent.
Another application of stablecoins is financing. Because stablecoins settle instantly while traditional rails can take days, stablecoins can dramatically reduce finance costs for borrowers or increase the yield for lenders.
On the infra layer one of the biggest problems is moving money between traditional rails and stablecoins - some call this on/off-ramp. Here traditional rails include not only bank accounts and credit cards, but also something like Pix in Brazil and Mpesa in Africa.
Once these pieces of infra are in place and individual apps have found PMF, we could see the emergence of a global payment network that competes with the likes of Visa, or a neobank super-app that offers a full suite of financial services like savings, payment, and financing.
AIxCrypto-Enabled Consumer Apps
We don't know what the winning apps will look like, but we do know there are two new enabling technologies at our disposal. AI offers intelligence and creativity, and crypto offers payment and markets. Magic is bound is happen at the intersection of the two.
Case in point, a Marc Andresseen-funded AI agent became the first AI millionaire by creating a religion and buying a meme coin associated with it. This sounds silly, weird, or even controversial, but this is precisely the kind of emerging behaviour could potentially become something much bigger than it looks in its infancy. The sillier, the weirder, the more controversial, the more we are excited.
Social, gaming, entertainment, health, education, science, and productivity are all possible domains that are ripe for disruption. Some half-baked ideas to inspire you:
- A dating app where the man needs to make a micropayment to show intent and matches are suggested by AI.
- A fitness app where your friends can bet on your progress with crypto and offers AI-based advice.
- An AI personal assist that books services and products on your behalf and pays in stablecoins.
- A prediction market for the long-tail of events that is automatically settled with AI.
- A Tamagotchi-like game where the the pets are intelligent and live as NFTs onchain.
- A social network that uses zk-identity to ensure that all users are real humans rather than AI.
- An app that makes it easy for brands and merchants to launch token-based royalty programs while making suggestions to consumers using AI.
- A livestreaming app where fans tip AI creators with crypto.
- A crowd-funding app for early-stage scientific IPs that uses AI to predict their odds of success.
- A token-incentivized platform to contribute personal health or shopping data for AI research or model training.
- A baby development app that provides an AI-personalized advice while preserving baby's personal privacy using crypto or crypto-adjacent technologies.
Token-Incentivized Networks or Marketplaces
Tokens have been proven to be a one of the most powerful mechanisms to coordinate large-scale human activities. DePIN is an subcategory of this, but the network or marketplace doesn't have to physical - it could be virtual as well.
Many existing token-incentivized networks and marketplaces are trying to compete with large incumbents in an established market. This might work, but incumbents' defensibility should not be underestimated. Ideally however we would like to tackle markets are the growing and will be big in the future even if they are small today.
Virtual power plants are an example of this. They are effectively clean energy marketplaces between the grid and the residential homes. There isn't really an established incumbent yet, but it's very clear grid stability will become an ever-growing problem in the near future. Using token incentives could supercharge a startup operating in this market and outcompete other players.
A token-incentivized data marketplace for robotics or drug development is another idea. It's still early days for robotics and applied AI in drug development, but both will undoubtedly become big in the coming year future and both need large amounts of high quality data.