February Recap

Link to Medium
https://medium.com/@txbchain/texas-blockchain-february-recap-a-month-in-review-3aa819840635

An overview of Texas Blockchain’s achievements, activities, and progress over the past month.

Shanaya Kabnur & Melinda Wang, February 2024.

President’s Note

Julian Saks

February for Texas Blockchain was a success. We had our first speaker panel of the semester focusing on DePIN and had Greg Osuri, founder of Akash, and Josh Heller, founder of Longfi, as our panelists. It was a great event with 40+ students. We thank them for joining us.

Across all divisions, TxB is making substantial progress. In our Research and Writing division, all researchers have been placed under Prof. Fracassi or Prof. Vishwanath. We thank them as well for all that they do. We have ten students across three topics: MEV Exploitation on Ethereum, ML-based AMM Design, and ML-based yield maximization.

Our Labs members also had a packed month with a BASE workshop in preparation for their trip to ETH Denver to participate in BUIDL week. We wish them the best and are excited to see what they built! Additionally, we have confirmed our startups and talent pool members within our incubator, and the teams are working on milestones. We’re excited to see demos soon!

Our fund pitched Akash in January; this month, they’re pitching [TBD]. Recently, Collab Currency released reports of the fund’s progress, and for Q1, we saw the TxB Fund produce a return of +24.17%, which is a solid start. This month’s investment takes us up to nine since inception!

Our DAO team has also been expanding its efforts. Recently, we expanded our voting delegation to Ripple and partnered with Medallion to track member progress, a part of the DAO consultancy efforts. We are now at nine votes and counting!

Our Dev Ops team recently presented their progress in building the Quai miner at our general meeting. We will have a node running soon. I’m excited to see the Dev Ops team expand their efforts to other networks next month.

Finally, our Media team worked to produce two podcast episodes, which will be released soon! This now takes TxB to seven episodes.

Funds: Executing Investment Strategies

AIOZ & DIMO Fund Pitch Link

Head: Savindu Wimalasooriya

The first week of the month the Funds Team reviewed previous investments and discussed specific investment narratives. The next week, the team decided on two investments, AIOZ and DIMO, because they followed the AI and DePIN narratives. They are also relatively undervalued and have strong product offerings, revenue streams, and incentive programs for customers. The week before the pitch, the team drafted up a slide deck and made the final touches, specifically deciding the investment amount at the current price offering. The final week of the month, Texas Blockchain’s Funds division pitched AIOZ and DIMO, and they were both voted in favor of by the club.

Dev Ops: Infrastructure Development

Head: Shantikiran Chanal

In February, the Texas Blockchain DevOps division achieved significant milestones in its infrastructure development. The team successfully completed the setup of the quai validator, marking a pivotal completion of the software aspects of our project. Building on this momentum, the team established a comprehensive roadmap aimed at deploying Base, Aleo, and Xai nodes on Virtual Private Servers (VPS) in the forthcoming months. Initial efforts to set up our base node are already underway, with the team eagerly anticipating the expansion of our capabilities and the realization of our ambitious project objectives in the near future. Additionally, the team conducted strategic calculations and in-depth analyses to determine the optimal VPS server for hosting our Base node, ensuring the infrastructure is both robust and scalable to meet future demands.

Labs: Hacking at ETHDenver

Head: Sree Duggirala

This month, Texas Blockchain Labs members traveled to Denver to participate in ETH Denver, a community-owned innovation festival committed to empowering the Web3 community for BUIDL Week. BUIDLWeek isthe week-long hackathon with over $1M in bounties! They had the opportunity to meet incredible students and builders from all over the world. They decided built Swoosh, a streamlined payment app, combining ERC-4337 with payment and bill-splitting features from Venmo and Splitwise. While they didn’t win, it was an invaluable learning experience and opportunity to meet incredible individuals. During downtime, they attended several side events, speaker panels, and parties from popular DeFi protocols, L2s, and more! Stay tuned for more updates to see what they built while in Denver.

Incubator: Welcoming New Startups

Head: Cole Anderson

February marked the start of the third Incubator cohort. This spring the division welcomed two new startups, Kingdomly and Arthur Labs. Kingdomly, led by founder Ethan Rife, is an NFT launchpad, allowing for creators to publish their collections easier than ever. Watson Lewis-Rodriguez has created Arthur Labs with the purpose of dramatically accelerating the development timeline for entrepreneurs’ Web2 and Web3 marketplaces, from six months to just one week. Incubator also welcomed seven new Talent Pool Members to the Incubator this spring, and we can’t wait to see what invaluable contributions these highly skilled individuals will provide to the startups. We’d also like to extend our special thanks to Alan Orwick, founder of Texas Blockchain and Quai Network, for his time leading the first workshop of the semester, his expert insights were immensely valuable for both startups.

Links to Startup Websites:

https://www.kingdomly.app/mint

https://arthurlabs.net

Kingdomly

Kingdomly is a permissionless, no code NFT platform that allows users to create NFTs. The platform initially began as an infinity guild in 2021, building software that automated payments for gaming guilds, scaling guilds into kingdoms. Kingdormly shifted away from infinity guild in 2022, and decided to focus on building a product where games can support guild infrastructure by creating a rental market for utility-based NFTs. Most recently, Kingdomly launched Creator with the initial intent of helping game developers tokenize game assets immediately. However, they pivoted into a platform that allows creators to make artwork and deploy contracts for NFTs.

Kingdomly’s main focus lies in mitigating risks for holders. They are implementing measures such as a badge system, identifying users that are officially partnered with Kingdomly and delegating partners to ecosystem incubators, approving users that are verified by the ecosystem incubator. Through these features, they hope to protect the interests of buyers on the platform.

Kingdomly plans for significant growth in 2024, with Ethan Rife being optimistic about launching 50 collections that sell out and bringing 1 million in revenue.

DAO: XRP Proposals and Consulting Progress

Head: Viren Govin

Longhorn DAO voted on 3 XRP proposals, which included a proposal to add new transaction result codes, a proposal to standardize the fee calculations, and a proposal to rerank the threshold for failing if exchange rate is above the order book rate. The team also made considerable progress on consulting projects, which included having internal meetings with startup founders and planning out a consulting recommendations pitch deck per project.

Research: Embarking on Student Projects

Head: Esha Bora

This month, students worked on matching with different research projects based on their specific interests and skill sets. The research cohort will be working with UT research labs on various projects such as MEV, ML based yield maximization, and AMM research. Currently, students are working on being onboarded to their specific projects and learning the preliminary skills and information which will enable them to get started with working on data sets and other research.

Media: Event Marketing and Podcast Production

Head: Melinda Wang

The Media side of Texas Blockchain has been working on marketing the Speaker Panel Event and providing recaps on DevOps/Fund presentations. The media team is excited to be in the process of editing two podcast episodes with our panelists — Greg Osuri from Akash Network and Josh Heller from LongFi Solutions. They will be released early March, so keep an eye out!

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