We are excited to announce our participation in Warlock Lab's $8M seed funding round. Warlock is a crypto-native trading firm focusing on market making and MEV strategies across chains, as well as orderflow monetization, helping DeFi protocols improve their efficiency and sustainability by re-capturing value otherwise lost due to malicious MEV.

Crypto is still a young breed. It grows new limbs almost every day. Our most critical and demanding job as fund managers is to assess which of these verticals could one day develop into leading narratives and significant market opportunities. Our predictions for 2025 represent verticals across the Infrastructure, DeFi and Consumer stack to which we generally attribute large and disruptive market potential.

We are excited to lead Liquorice's $1.2M pre-seed funding round. Liquorice developed a novel approach to connecting intent-based decentralized exchanges to a network of solvers and market makers through an API. With that, they are addressing some of the most pressing challenges in DeFi: enabling the optimal execution for traders by broadening the access for non-vertically integrated solvers to get offchain quotes.

Celo is an EVM-compatible L1 with a special focus on enabling global mobile-first peer-to-peer payments while remaining carbon-negative. As core contributors of the Celo blockchain, cLabs proposed transitioning from a standalone L1 to an Ethereum L2 in July. With this article, we first want to highlight Celo’s mission and values to then understand the aforementioned technical proposal and how it would differentiate Celo from existing L2s.