Tony L.

💥 Metropolis Technologies Raises $𝟭.𝟲𝗕 💥 Funding comes in 2 rounds: $500M equity round led by LionTree and $1.1B from J.P. Morgan. Metropolis is now 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 $𝟱𝗕. With the fresh funding, the plan is to take their "recognition and payment-automation" tech beyond parking assets. This would include retail stores, drive-throughs, gas stations, hotels and partnerships with real estate/asset owner. Congrats to Alex Israel, Peter Fisher, Courtney Fukuda, Travis Kell, Ryan Hunt,Chris Sherman, Robert Bland, Paul Rooney, Lookman Olusanya and the rest of the Metropolis family. #fundraise #parkinginvestment #parking #parkingindustry #metropolois Parking Today Media Parking Network B.V. National Parking Association International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI) Tim Maloney Advisory Tim Maloney Reservations Lab

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Tens of thousands of blockchains are coming. It's a reality Polygon Labs is preparing for. I had a great talk with Sri Misra on why I believe sector-specific chains will win over general-purpose chains. Here’s why I believe that: → Every sector needs its own tools. What works for gaming is not right for payments. What fits social apps is not the best for DeFi. → One-size-fits-all chains slow everyone down. Sector chains move fast, solve one job, and fit like a glove. This is why Polygon PoS is focused on payments and RWAs, and Katana is focused on DeFi. But there’s the twist: more chains mean more mess for users (imagine using 15+ apps, all on different chains). That’s where Agglayer comes in. To hide the mess and unify chains across any stack or VM. • Builders get what they need: custom blockchains, no trade-offs • Users get what they want: invisible, easy, no extra steps Polygon Labs is building for a future where thousands of blockchains fit together, but it still feels like one place. All the details on the Alpha Un# podcast: unhashed.co/marc

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Hey #blockchain world -- I've heard from many in the #Algofam and beyond about the recent mainnet launches by our enterprise partners at Mann Deshi Foundation and SEWA Cooperative Federation. Lots of great questions and genuine interest about the solution, why blockchain, where/when wallets and transactions, etc. I'm excited to share more detail on each. Keep in mind these are enterprises with millions of existing users. That means they need to spend time even after the launch to make sure the onboarding process is seamless. Unlike a startup, the enterprise doesn't need to go out and sell the solution to new customers; they are adopting blockchain bc they see it bringing efficiency to a part of their business process in serving their existing user base. But we're literally going from Web0 to Web3 in some of these cases. So the ramp up won't be immediate as the enterprise ensures their largely non-tech user base isn't confused or frightened off by a new digital process. But it will happen. And we're pretty sure that once it does happen, the appetite for the enterprise and the user to do more with their wallets will only grow. Tagging some of my remarkable colleagues here who've helped manage the process and provide vision for the solution. So jumping in now to the Mann Deshi Digital Credit Scorecard: Mann Deshi Rural Cooperative Bank has been the first provider of savings and lending products to hundreds of thousands of women microentrepreneurs in India. Mann Deshi Foundation supplements the Bank’s work with its Business School, Women’s Chamber of Commerce, vocational workshops and training programs to help its members become successful entrepreneurs and achieve financial independence. The Foundation also commits resources to help establish and verify creditworthiness to support its members in accessing credit from other private lenders. This is a very resource and time intensive process with documents often being lost and their authenticity being questioned. Mann Deshi has now launched a blockchain-based Digital Credit Scorecard, implemented as a token stored securely within a digital wallet that leverages HashiCorp's Key Management System (KMS) for robust protection of cryptographic keys. Built on the Algorand blockchain, this solution securely records and verifies credit-related data, affording members reliable access to their credit information – and the ability to share it with lending institutions. This innovative approach aims to overcome the significant barriers to credit access that holds back thousands of microentrepreneurs from scaling their businesses. Algorand Foundation AlgoBharat Staci Warden Nikhil Varma, PhD Meet Thosar Matthew Keller Mike Feher Chetna Gala Sinha

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Hitting a wall trying to vibe code anything complex? It turns out the ceiling for today’s coding agents is not just about model quality. It is about foundations. High-quality structure and guardrails dramatically increase what AI can build and maintain over time. Woz (YC W25) apps are generated on a rock-solid production foundation and designed to be edited and maintained by real developers, not just AI. And better structure is not just better for humans. It makes AI coding agents dramatically better too. Now you can open any Woz-generated app directly in Cursor or Claude Code in one click and see the difference: clean, structured, production-grade code you or your agents can actually build on.

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Ethereum Foundation Targets Interoperability as Top UX Priority Follow Rohan Davis | Jetvoy.com for more insights 👌 The initiative marks a strategic pivot: after years spent scaling throughput and lowering costs, the protocol team is now zeroing in on interoperability as the key to user experience. #Jetvoy #Crypto

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The senate passing the GENIUS act yesterday is not just about regulation catching up, its a warning shot. The focus on consumer protection sends a clear signal about where enforcement is headed, and compliance /AML is now baked into the stablecoin framework itself. So if you are building in stablecoins or any regulated corner of crypto, you should definitely take a note. Compliance is a moat, and you should build accordingly. https://lnkd.in/eV5QSHMh

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This year’s Crypto Valley Association's Web3 Banking Symposium is framed around a shift: from adoption to acceleration. And it's accurate. Acceleration is good, but acceleration changes the risk profile. When institutions were piloting tokenization or testing stablecoin settlements, the security question was manageable, small scope, controlled environments, point-in-time audits. At production scale, that changes, because smart contracts evolve, configurations shift, and dependencies update. The code that was audited six months ago may not be the code that’s running today. Every production system makes the architectural assumption that what was secure at deployment remains secure as it evolves. But that assumption gets harder to sustain as infrastructure scales. In cloud infrastructure, this exact problem created the CSPM category. Nobody questioned whether enterprises needed continuous posture management once they were running production workloads. The question was how to do it well. Web3 is reaching that inflection point. Institutions moving from pilots to production need the same discipline applied to smart contracts, deployment pipelines, and on-chain logic. That’s what we’re building at Dedge Security. And it’s what I’ll be discussing with banks and infrastructure builders at the Symposium next week. Looking forward to it! #Cybersecurity #Blockchain #CryptoValley #Zurich

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💲 Emergent announced $23 million in Series A funding to empower more people to build and run businesses simply The round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from YC, Together, Prosus Ventures and angels including Jeff Dean, Devendra Chaplot, Balaji Srinivasan and brings Emergent’s total funding to $30 million, including a $7 million seed round. “My brother and I built Emergent to equip anyone with an idea and a phone with the tools to create software affordably,” said Mukund Jha, Co-Founder and CEO. 📖 Find out more here: https://lnkd.in/e-fPZh-w #StartupsMagazine #Startups #Entrepreneur #Funding

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Vitalik Buterin thinks Ethereum’s ZK proving stack is turning a corner. In particular, he wants the ecosystem to eliminate one of its most persistent UX roadblocks: week-long L2 withdrawals on optimistic rollup. “ZKVMs are, like, almost production-ready this year in a way that was totally not true…even one year ago,” Buterin said. Read more: https://lnkd.in/e3NKT7HQ

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If you look outside of crypto trading/DeFi/ETFs/etc., the vibe in crypto has been to stay alive for much longer than October. There's been little investor interest, enterprise movement, or other funding/adoption in blockchain, outside of financial applications and products, for the better part of two years. Which is why the current "bad vibes" were always going to arrive. It is the inevitable result of a market's misplaced focus on crypto's price/profit function. And has reduced a powerful technology (blockchain) to its lowest/least interesting feature. My concern now is how this gambling-like reputation is going to hold back the adoption of useful decentralized tech. Because, among other things, the institutional money that came in pre-October liquidation is now holding back. Waiting to see if crypto as a system is reliable. And that's before you consider all the normal holders - whose concerns are well put here in this article by Dalvin Brown Hannah Erin Lang - that may never recover. One of them says "lot of people are exhausted, irritated, or angry." Those of us in crypto who got into this space to make the world better, not to build casinos, feel the same. https://lnkd.in/dpxtFznV

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