Our Content

Research-driven builders and investors in the cybernetic economy

We contributed to Lido DAO, P2P.org, =nil; Foundation, DRPC, Neutron and invested into 150+ projects

Legion: Reinventing the ICO

Stepan Gershuni

Oct 8, 2024

A new era of merit-based, compliant web3 fundraising in here. We’re excited to announce our recent investment in Legion, a web3 platform that aims to democratize access to early-stage investments.

Bolt: accelerating Ethereum through preconfirmations

Artem Kotelskiy and Konstantin Lomashuk

Aug 26, 2024

We are excited to share our investment in Chainbound, an Ethereum company focused on bolt — a protocol for Ethereum preconfirmations and other proposer commitments. Bolt unlocks sub-second transaction experience for users and creates a new revenue source for Ethereum proposers. Bolt’s design focuses on trustless participation via restaked collateral, as well as compatibility with the existing mev-boost PBS pipeline. This provides safe, neutral and incentive-compatible introduction of new proposer commitments, pushing Ethereum’s innovation frontier forward.

Scade: Accelerating AI-Driven Business Transformation

Stepan Gershuni

Sep 16, 2024

cyber•Fund is proud to lead the latest funding round of Scade, a no-code platform to build, distribute and use AI agents.

Tech Tree: Crypto x AI

Vitaly Kleban, Stepan Gershuni

Sep 9, 2024

This article explores the key technology areas, recent advancements and open opportunities for research in the space of Decentralized AI.

Frontiers of Decentralized AI

Stepan Gershuni, Vitaly Kleban

Sep 4, 2024

What to build, where to invest and what to expect from Decentralized AI: 38 ideas, open opportunities and challenges in decentralized & distributed AI

Introducing cyber•Fund

Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov

Dec 14, 2023

We are thrilled to announce the relaunch of cyber•Fund: a private investment company led by Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov which consists of a liquid portfolio, a strategic portfolio and a new $100mm venture arm. We believe that the future will be radically transformed by technologies emerging today. Our aim is to help fuel the founders accelerating the frontier of the new cybernetic economy at the intersection of blockchain, robotics, AI and IoT.

Kin: Personal AI for life at work

Stepan Gershuni

Sep 26, 2024

Kin is a personal AI companion designed to grow alongside its users. Our investment in Kin aligns with our belief that private, personalized AI will become an integral part of individuals' lives, with career coaching as its first major application.

The Internet of Intelligence

Stepan Gershuni

Sep 3, 2024

The Internet of Intelligence is emerging as the next evolution of the web. Today, in web2 or web3 you use applications to get work done. But in the Internet of Intelligence you you simply state your needs, and the task is completed automatically. The shift towards an AI-driven workforce isn't just possible – it's economically inevitable. The question is how we shape this transition to benefit all of humanity.

AI is coming to an end… devices

Vitaly Kleban , Stepan Gershuni

Jul 17, 2024

Cyber.Fund sponsors TinyML Foundation to accelerate communication-efficient model training and provide AI access to the physical world and real economy. TinyML Foundation has over 19,000 members across 38 countries, significant educational initiatives, and partnerships with academia and industry, the foundation is at the forefront of advancing AI at the edge. 

Maximum Viable Security: A New Framing for Ethereum Issuance

Artem Kotelskiy, Danny McNutt, Sonya Kim and adcv

Jul 6, 2024

Maximum Viable Security (MVS) is a new framework for Ethereum Issuance. In collaboration with Steakhouse, we derive this monetary policy framework from the core values of Ethereum – security and neutrality. In short, MVS maximizes security without compromising scarcity, while MVI minimizes issuance without compromising security. In other words, MVS prioritizes expansion over efficiency, while MVI does the opposite. We also apply MVS to the issuance reduction proposal, by showing that issuance reduction can compromise security and neutrality in a direct way. We study solo stakers’ cost structures and staked ETH concentration with Coinbase, and show that the latter effect, on balance, far outweighs the advantages of cutting the issuance.

Funding BitVM

Walt Smith, Konstantin Lomashuk, Vasiliy Shapovalov

Jul 3, 2024

Despite being the sole network with explicitly defined monetary policies, Bitcoin continues to lack the expressivity and scale needed to make its currency - bitcoin - useful. Bitcoin’s smart contracts and apps today consist of unscalable or inefficient schemes incapable of hosting scalable censorship resistant apps. With the goal of encouraging open, neutral development of Bitcoin, Cyber•Fund is proud to have given a grant to ZeroSync, the nonprofit behind the BitVM and adjecent technologies.

MetaLeX: next-gen of cybernetic orgs

Konstantin Lomashuk, Stepan Gershuni, Walt Smith

Jun 18, 2024

We are excited to announce our investment in MetaLeX, a company which opens the opportunity of DAOs to the world by giving DAOs new, granular control over themselves. MetaLeX heightens DAO efficiency and accountability with BORGs - next-gen cybernetic orgs which scale socially, are agile, legally sound and, above all, accountable. With BORGs, traditional businesses can effectively leverage blockchain networks and existing DAOs gain alignment with contributors, foundations, and backers via bespoke legal structures and next-gen code (escrows, liens, etc).

Symbiotic: permissionless restaking for crypto

Konstantin Lomashuk and Artem Kotelskiy

Jun 11, 2024

We are pleased to announce our investment in Symbiotic, a new protocol for shared security. Symbiotic helps networks build faster and more securely by providing permissionless restaking. Its immutable core contracts completely remove governance risk and censorship, while bespoke-by-network components enable faster deployment and enhance flexibility. This radical open design ensures discovery of the full spectrum of risks within networks, allowing liquidity to assess, compare and choose an appropriate profile.

Backing Backed: Tokenization is all you need

Walt Smith, Konstantin Lomashuk

May 27, 2024

Since securities first traded, public capital markets have served as the cornerstone for individual economic well-being and global commerce. However, inefficiencies have limited access to markets to those sileod in the jurisdiction of orgin. We are excited to announce our investment in Backed, a company at the forefront of tokenization. By leveraging the Swiss DLT act and neutral networks like Ethereum, Backed lets anyone access open, secure, and composable capital markets.

Announcing MVI Grants

Artem Kotelskiy

Apr 19, 2024

We are excited to share an update on the MVI Grants program. The Grants selection committee consisting of Artem Kotelskiy, Brett Palatiello and Elias Simos has reviewed many high-quality applications, and selected five stellar teams that are complimentary in their expertise and approaches.

The Spectre of MEV on Bitcoin

Walt Smith

Mar 18, 2024

Early into Ethereum’s journey, the unbounded dangers of Miner Extractable Value or MEV drove people back to Bitcoin. “MEV nihilists” embraced Bitcoin’s extreme simplicity as the sole solution to the pathological tendencies of open, expressive systems. While Bitcoin still lacks expressiveness, the introduction of Ordinal Theory by Casey Rodarmor, along with a renaissance of proposed implementations for trust-minimized sidechains has brought the dark forest to Bitcoin’s once pearly shores.

Towards the Cybereconomy

Stepan Gershuni

Mar 11, 2024

AI is advancing rapidly. AGI is coming. This is the largest technological wave impacting society. It leads to risks such as the centralization of power and ownership by a limited number of entities, censorship, regulatory control, unequal distribution of technology, and politically biased AI. In this article we explore how cryptography, distributed systems, machine learning, and cryptoeconomic networks, when used collectively, can enhance existing AI systems. This increases competition, accelerates innovation, and makes AI more fair, accessible, explainable, and useful.

The MVI Grants Program

Konstantin Lomashuk and Artem Kotelskiy

Feb 5, 2024

We announce a $500k cyber•Grants Program devoted to studying the broad impacts of Ethereum issuance policy changes, in particular on the staking economy and its decentralization. As part of motivation, we present a basic analysis suggesting that the currently proposed MVI policy hurts solo & decentralized actors much more than the centralized ones, and describe a realistic scenario where Coinbase controls >51% of ETH staked.

From Hands-On to Hands-Off: Playbook for Serial Founders

Alexander Orlov

Feb 19, 2024

How do founders step back and shift into a more strategic role? Our Strategy Team researched this subtle question, and interviewed unicorn founders, fund managers and CEOs to create an actionable playbook.

Deconstructing Account Abstraction

Artem Kotelskiy

Jan 11, 2024

Account Abstraction solves Ethereum onboarding UX problems: seed phrase backups and ETH-denominated gas fees. In this article, we decompose Account Abstraction at the lowest level, explaining in detail what it is and how the corresponding technical standard ERC-4337 works. After that we also conduct three case studies, covering various technological aspects of smart contract wallets — security models in Argent, modular contract architecture in Safe, and network abstraction in Avocado.