# Alliance

> Alliance is the destination for ambitious builders creating technology companies.

This file lists useful Alliance website pages for large language models. It is generated from public website content and structured discovery data.

## AI discovery

- [AI summary JSON](https://alliance.xyz/ai/summary.json): Machine-readable overview of Alliance and AI discovery links.
- [AI service JSON](https://alliance.xyz/ai/service.json): Structured description of the Alliance startup accelerator service.
- [AI FAQ JSON](https://alliance.xyz/ai/faq.json): Structured FAQPage JSON generated from published homepage FAQ content.

## Core pages

- [Alliance | Crypto & AI Accelerator](https://alliance.xyz): We help crypto & AI startups reach escape velocity. $500k funding. Demo Day in NYC. Interview invites sent within 1 week. Apply in under 20 minutes.
- [Launches | Alliance](https://alliance.xyz/launches): Discover new products launched by Alliance founders
- [Alliance Perks Submitted](https://alliance.xyz/apply-to-perks-submitted): Perk Submitted
- [Email Safety](https://alliance.xyz/email-safety): Check if an email is really from Alliance
- [Essays | Alliance](https://alliance.xyz/essays): Crypto's leading accelerator & founder network essays.
- [Apply to Alliance Perks](https://alliance.xyz/apply-to-perks): Apply to Alliance Perks
- [Strategic Investments | Alliance](https://alliance.xyz/strategic-investments): Strategic Investments
- [SWE Jobs | Alliance](https://alliance.xyz/swe-jobs): Looking for software engineer roles in crypto? Alliance startups are hiring. Apply simultaneously to hundreds of companies now.
- [Accelerator Application | Alliance](https://alliance.xyz/apply): Apply to the Alliance accelerator program and join the leading network for crypto founders.
- [Companies | Alliance](https://alliance.xyz/companies): Companies

## Recent company pages

- [Manifest](https://alliance.xyz/companies/manifest): Making American assets defi compatible
- [8020](https://alliance.xyz/companies/earlyfans): Robinhood for crypto
- [Ajent](https://alliance.xyz/companies/ajent): A task engine for AI agents
- [Sherlock](https://alliance.xyz/companies/sherlock): Decentralized exploit protection
- [Cartridge](https://alliance.xyz/companies/cartridge-gaming-company): Building onchain games and autonomous worlds
- [Moonshot](https://alliance.xyz/companies/moonshot): Buy & sell memes with Apple Pay.
- [Liquifi](https://alliance.xyz/companies/liquifi): Token management platform \(acquired by Coinbase\)
- [Inco](https://alliance.xyz/companies/inco): Confidentiality Layer for Blockchains
- [0x](https://alliance.xyz/companies/0x): A Liquidity Aggregator For DeFi Applications
- [inshallah](https://alliance.xyz/companies/inshallah): Neobank for halal finance
- [Blockcast](https://alliance.xyz/companies/blockcast): DePIN for digital content delivery
- [MetaVoice](https://alliance.xyz/companies/metavoice): Voice AI Agents
- [Offramp](https://alliance.xyz/companies/offramp): First-world Finance for Emerging Markets
- [Mapsdotfun](https://alliance.xyz/companies/proto): Google maps on-chain
- [Minteo](https://alliance.xyz/companies/minteo): Stablecoin issuer for Latam
- [Time.fun](https://alliance.xyz/companies/timefun): Get access to your favorite creators
- [Kyber](https://alliance.xyz/companies/kyber): Liquidity Hub for Crypto Trading and DeFi
- [Xverse](https://alliance.xyz/companies/xverse): Bitcoin Wallet for Web3
- [Covenant](https://alliance.xyz/companies/covenant): The credit layer powering on-chain liquidity
- [Caldera](https://alliance.xyz/companies/caldera): The rollups-as-a-service platform
- [Zabio](https://alliance.xyz/companies/zabio): P2P stablecoin exchange for Latam
- [Amihan](https://alliance.xyz/companies/amihan): To equalize opportunity for all through play
- [Tribe.run](https://alliance.xyz/companies/triberun): Socialfi on Solana
- [Cred Protocol](https://alliance.xyz/companies/cred-protocol): Decentralized credit scoring
- [Force Prime](https://alliance.xyz/companies/force-prime): Check-in to get rewards

## Recent launch pages

- [HyperLink](https://alliance.xyz/launches/hyperlink): Prime broker for Hyperliquid
- [FreePort](https://alliance.xyz/launches/freeport): Trade like a Hedge Fund

## Essays

- [Before It Was Obvious](https://alliance.xyz/essays/before-it-was-obvious): You're sitting in front of your computer and you want to build a startup. You've seen Cursor sell to Elon for $60B . Maybe the previous generation was Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel. You look at these founders and compare yourself to them. They don't seem that much smarter than you. Their resumes aren't better than yours.
- [Yamanaka Factors: How Four Proteins Could Rewind Aging](https://alliance.xyz/essays/yamanaka-factors): For most of the last century, biologists treated aging the way a mechanic treats an old car. Parts wear out, damage piles up, and the slow rusting eventually stops the engine. Under this view, aging runs in one direction. Biology has no reverse gear.
- [Finding Unlikely Allies](https://alliance.xyz/essays/unlikely-allies): When Founders build on top of someone else's platform, they can activate a network of allies they could never have afforded to recruit.
- [Fintech: Request for Startups](https://alliance.xyz/essays/fintech-rfs): While it may seem that the low hanging fruit from the digitization of finance has been picked, about half of the world population is still either physical-first or outright unbanked. Furthermore, current technology waves – namely crypto and AI – have the potential to unlock greater value for consumers and businesses.
- [You're Vibe Coding Wrong](https://alliance.xyz/essays/youre-vibe-coding-wrong): Most developers use Tier 1 for UX & rapid prototyping, Tier 2 for daily development, and Tier 3 for complex engineering challenges. The best strategy is to combine them when needed rather than trying to force one tool to do everything. Here's what each tier actually delivers and when you should use them
- [Your Moat Isn't Your AI Prompt. It's Your Evaluations](https://alliance.xyz/essays/what-are-ai-evaluations): Anyone can copy a prompt, but they can't replicate the months of iterative learning, the domain knowledge and the edge cases discovered through real user interactions, and the systematic evaluation framework that guided every prompt tweaking decision.
- [Shopping is Dead, AI is Taking Over](https://alliance.xyz/essays/shopping-is-dead-ai-is-taking-over): Major payment networks are building the infrastructure while AI platforms began to deploy; for startups, this opens opportunities in vertical specialization and merchant tools; and SEO will evolve into AEO as businesses adapt to optimize for AI agents rather than human shoppers.
- [Single-Agent vs. Multi-Agent](https://alliance.xyz/essays/single-agent-vs.-multi-agent): o3 vs Manus Soon after the recent release of Manus AI and my article about it, we've witnessed a Cambrian explosion of AI Agents. The agent ecosystem has expanded rapidly with numerous frameworks designed specifically for building autonomous agents. Examples include Google's Agent SDK and the A2A protocol, OpenAI Agents SDK. We have also seen new models come out like o3, which resolves multimodal prompts with impressive speed, accuracy, and a wide breadth of capabilities, clearly distinguishing itself from previous models.
- [AI's USB-C Standard: Understanding MCP](https://alliance.xyz/essays/understanding-mcp): MCP is defined as an open protocol that standardizes how applications communicate and provide context to LLMs. One analogy that I really liked is that “MCPs for AI applications are like USB-C for hardware”; that is standardized, plug-and-playable, versatile, and transformative.
- [18 Months Until Autonomous AI](https://alliance.xyz/essays/timeline-to-autonomous-ai): The autonomous AI revolution isn't science fiction anymore, it's here now. Founders who start acquainting themselves and adopting these workflows, will have a lot of competitive advantage moving forward.
- [An LLM In Your Pocket](https://alliance.xyz/essays/the-compact-llm-disruption): With the advent of Deepseek, Qwen and others, we are witnessing a fundamental transformation in what is attainable with AI applications.
- [How AI Has Changed Startups Forever](https://alliance.xyz/essays/ai-has-changed-startups-forever): When ChatGPT first came out three years ago, I wrote a wrapper to help myself prioritize emails and messages. My coding skills were rusty, so I used ChatGPT itself as a coding copilot. I instantly felt the magic. It took me maybe half a day to finish the project, while it would normally take me a few days in the pre-AI era.
- [2024 Crypto Startup Trends Report](https://alliance.xyz/essays/crypto-startup-trends-24): In this report, we provide trends observed in our application data and insights as to what they indicate for the broader startup ecosystem.
- [20 Lessons for Crypto Founders](https://alliance.xyz/essays/lessons-for-crypto-founders): I recently gave a keynote at Solana Breakpoint with the goal to pack as much actionable information for crypto founders into the time I had as possible. It was pretty well received so figured I’d take some time to elaborate a bit and give people a quick place to find each piece of advice.
- [Gen Z’s American Dream: 5 Leg Parlay Your Way to Basic Physiological Needs](https://alliance.xyz/essays/gen-zs-american-dream): Rising house prices, stagnant housing supply, grocery store “price gouging,” money printer going brrr, the gig economy, meme-stocks/coins, and Kevin Hart and Jamie Fox shilling you different sportsbooks to donate your paycheck to at every TV ad break - the new American Dream seems to be some version of “you too are just one five-leg parlay away from being able to consider buying a home.” What did they do to us?\!
- [Decentralized Energy: Crypto-Enabled Virtual Power Plants](https://alliance.xyz/essays/decentralized-energy): A growing number of Californians have already begun to receive compensation for their contributions to grid stability. These individuals have partnered with innovative companies like OhmConnect, SunRun, Tesla, and others to participate in what is known as "virtual power plants" \(VPPs\).
- [How to get exposure to US real estate](https://alliance.xyz/essays/how-to-get-exposure-to-us-real-estate): Some people may know me through an interview I did four years ago with my more famous and charismatic brother Joma. That interview mostly focused on machine learning and its interactions with product design.
- [Real World Assets, Real World Application](https://alliance.xyz/essays/real-world-assets-real-world-adoption): It was previously thought that stablecoins and other tokenized real-world assets \(RWAs\) were the types of crypto applications that would onboard the normies. A decade ago bitcointalk.org talked ad nauseam about remittances. Years ago with the advent of smart contract chains our industry started envisioning Wall Street replacing DTCC with onchain stock settlement.
- [Where Whales Went to Work in H2 2023](https://alliance.xyz/essays/where-whales-went-to-work-in-h2-2023): When I was in my 20s, I subscribed naively to the idea that free markets were the best form of markets. My opinions have mellowed now — perhaps that’s wisdom or simply, age. I won’t make the pro case for free markets since it’s what characterized most of the last 50 years.
- [The Bitcoin L2 Opportunity](https://alliance.xyz/essays/the-bitcoin-l2-opportunity): Bitcoin Spot ETFs dominated discussions the last few weeks. With all that settled, the community’s attention got back to building on Bitcoin. This means answering the eternal question: “how to improve Bitcoin programmability?”
- [Ethereum is the Only Institution-Friendly Smart Contract Chain](https://alliance.xyz/essays/ethereum-is-the-only-institution-friendly-smart-contract-chain): Some have recently come to doubt where Ethereum sits in the crypto ecosystem. With Bitcoin as the clear “digital gold” store-of-value chain, and Solana as the fastest, cheapest, and bridgeless smart contract chain, this leaves the 100-IQ crowd viewing ETH as awkwardly stuck in the middle.
- [ZKPs, FHE, MPC: Managing Private State in Blockchains](https://alliance.xyz/essays/zkps-fhe-mpc-managing-private-state-in-blockchains): Bitcoin, launched almost 14 years ago, revolutionized financial transactions by eliminating intermediaries. The advent of Ethereum and smart contracts has further accelerated this trend, eliminating intermediaries from complex financial products like trading, lending, and options
- [Degens Are Pioneers](https://alliance.xyz/essays/degens-are-pioneers): A few months ago I came to a hilarious realization: “speculation” is the most contrarian idea among crypto VCs yet the most consensus idea among crypto users.
- [Lending Protocol Taxonomy, part 2: Interest Rates](https://alliance.xyz/essays/lending-protocol-taxonomy-part-2-interest-rates): In this post, I continue building out the taxonomy to talk about how various protocols determine interest rates.
- [What Does It Take to be a Good Crypto Founder?](https://alliance.xyz/essays/what-does-it-take-to-be-a-good-crypto-founder): I get this question a lot from founders and VCs: “what selection criteria do you use when screening teams for AllianceDAO?” So I decided to put my thoughts in writing.
- [Removing Web3’s Friction: Pt.1 Progressive Onboarding and Games](https://alliance.xyz/essays/removing-web3s-friction-pt-1-progressive-onboarding-and-games): Despite being a popular concept in the UX community, the first time I saw the term “progressive onboarding” used in Crypto was in this Privy.io blog. It’s a simple idea:
- [Do Things That Don’t Scale: Crypto Edition](https://alliance.xyz/essays/do-things-that-dont-scale-crypto-edition): Exactly 10 years ago Paul Graham wrote an essay titled “Do Things That Don’t Scale”. In my opinion, that was the single most important piece of content YC has put out for the startup community.
- [Lending Protocol Taxonomy, part 1: Interest Duration](https://alliance.xyz/essays/lending-protocol-taxonomy-part-1-interest-duration): Ever since the lending protocol Compound kicked off defi summer in 2020, countless lending protocols have popped up. Many were forks. But some introduced new mechanisms to push the space forward. This blog series will attempt to put a taxonomy on the zoo of lending protocols. Although Aave and Compound are still leading the market in TVL, it is an interesting exercise to understand what innovations are still hidden in the long tail of the market.
- [Hard Pivot from Crypto](https://alliance.xyz/essays/hard-pivot-from-crypto): Since the beginning of the year I’ve worked closely with at least 5–10 startups that pivoted away from crypto.
- [How to scale app rollups](https://alliance.xyz/essays/how-to-scale-app-rollups): App rollups are emerging as the clear winner in scaling a specific set of Ethereum’s applications. These applications benefit from permissionless and strong ownership guarantees but don’t require simultaneous interactions between all the application users.
- [The Magic behind AllianceDAO](https://alliance.xyz/essays/the-magic-behind-alliancedao): A few months ago at one of the dinners with ALL11 founders I had an epiphany. I realized why so many of our alumni raved about us. So I gave this talk during that dinner.
- [Whale Songs Explained](https://alliance.xyz/essays/whale-songs-explained): This blog post will outline how this is achieved, and how to preempt the unexpected challenges if you decide to take this demo to the next level.
- [Unblocking On-Chain Games Pt. 5: Bat-Channels](https://alliance.xyz/essays/unblocking-on-chain-games-pt-5-bat-channels): In this post, I propose a game design pattern that scales web3 games by processing game loops off-chain in a permissionless and trustless way. This requires representing game logic in a zk-circuit anchored to a blockchain.
- [A Maze With No Exits](https://alliance.xyz/essays/a-maze-with-no-exit): As Miller Whitehouse-Levine succinctly put it, after the past two weeks, “the SEC’s position \[is\] clear: centralize, shut down, or get out of the United States.
- [Intents are just…](https://alliance.xyz/essays/intents-are-just): There’s a lot of buzz around the word “intent” lately in the blockchain world. Some hail it as the next best thing after sliced bread, while others are making fun of it saying intents are just transactions or intents are just limit orders.
- [Four Reasons Why Crypto Startups Fail](https://alliance.xyz/essays/four-reasons-why-crypto-startups-fail): Two years ago I wrote about Common Pitfalls for Web3 Founders. As far as I know, this was the single most widely shared essay I’ve written for early-stage crypto founders.
- [The Convergence of AI and Web 3: Opportunities and Challenges](https://alliance.xyz/essays/the-convergence-of-ai-and-web-3-opportunities-and-challenges): Since the launch of chatGPT and GPT-4 shortly after, there is no shortage of content on how AI can revolutionize everything including Web 3.
- [Unblocking On-Chain Games: Part Four — Food Chain Magnate](https://alliance.xyz/essays/unblocking-on-chain-games-part-four-food-chain-magnate): Last month, I presented at ETHDenver on the five major problems facing fully on-chain games. The last, and perhaps thorniest is in finding game design patterns that are appropriate for blockchain’s as a medium. In the first post of this series, I mentioned a few games that might be particularly suited to being built on-chain.
- [How to Leverage ZKPs as a Web3 Builder](https://alliance.xyz/essays/how-to-leverage-zkps-as-a-web3-builder): Zero-knowledge proofs \(ZKPs\) are shaping out to be a fundamentally transformative technology for the next decade. ZKPs are finding applications within and outside Web 3. In Web 3, the technology is already addressing major bottlenecks in scalability and privacy; two major pain points in exciting blockchains.
- [How can PoPW networks win?](https://alliance.xyz/essays/how-can-popw-networks-win): Web 3 has enabled new ways of coordinating human activities on a global scale. Web 3 networks have the unique characteristic of being blind to state borders and user backgrounds as they only recognize the individual contributions to the network.
- [Unblocking On-Chain Games: Part Three — The Dogfighter Genre](https://alliance.xyz/essays/unblocking-on-chain-games-part-three-the-dogfight): While there have been several aerial combat boardgames, the branch that interests me here stems from Wings of War: Famous Aces \(Angiolino & Paglia, 2004\).
- [ZKPs in Web 3: Now and the Future](https://alliance.xyz/essays/zkps-in-web-3-now-and-the-future): Zero Knowledge technology, or zk in short, is an enabler technology that will transform not only Web 3 but other industries as well. It is a general enough technology to have a multitude of use cases.
- [The Appchain Universe: The Risks and Opportunities](https://alliance.xyz/essays/the-appchain-universe-the-risks-and-opportunities): Over the past year, several high-profile applications have launched their own application-specific chain or announced plans to do so in the future. This appchain direction was predictable for a number of high-growth projects.
- [The Case for Parallel Processing Chains](https://alliance.xyz/essays/the-case-for-parallel-processing-chains): When looking at the evolution of blockchain technology, we can recognize a strong trend of new L1s that focus on parallel execution. The idea is not new and is currently used in Solana’s Sealevel execution environment.
- [Unblocking On-Chain Games: Part Two — The 18xx Genre](https://alliance.xyz/essays/unblocking-on-chain-games-part-two-the-18xx-genre): Francis Tresham was a brilliant, if oft forgotten, designer who pioneered the 4X genre and introduced the game pattern “technology trees.” Sid Meier’s Civilization \(1991\), despite its auteurist title, was actually an adaptation of Tresham’s board game, Civilization \(1980\).
- [Unblocking On-Chain Games: Part One — Throughput](https://alliance.xyz/essays/unblocking-on-chain-games-part-one-throughput): Assuming a successful game has 20,000 concurrent users who change the game state every two seconds, on-chain games become woefully constrained. No blockchain can support those requirements.
- [Can an NFT be Art?](https://alliance.xyz/essays/can-nft-be-art): Non-Fungible Tokens are acting as deeds for artworks and other valuable objects \(be they digital or in meatspace\), but what would it mean for a token to itself be the object of aesthetic value? How do we imagine works born and living on blockchains in any meaningful sense?