Interchain Builders Program: Looking Back on Last Year
The Builders Program was officially born on June 8th, 2022 and we’ve had a wonderful year to look back to. Today we are eager to reflect back on a great start and tell you why we’re excited for the year to come!
Founding a company is challenging, founding a web3 company more so. The regulatory and fiscal landscape is complex to navigate and the technical complexity decentralized applications inherit make knowing where to start a difficult task. The Builders Program was initiated to help projects at all stages of development navigate these complexities, as well as the more specific challenges that come with the particularly decentralized Interchain.
Starting this year, Binary Builders will operate the Interchain Builders Program on behalf of the Interchain Foundation. Binary Builders was formed by several former employees of Interchain GmbH, including the original Builders Program team, as well as many other new talents.
Supporting Web3 Builders
Our mandate is to support teams building on top of the Interchain Stack, while staying agnostic to whether the project is building an Infrastructure layer, DeFi protocol, NFT platform or other type of solution. After having gone through 127 applications last year, we’ve been able to support 30 teams who were all at various stages of their project. Some were just getting started and we were there to provide guidance on where and how to incorporate and how to approach their token economic design. With the help of the expert core developers building Tendermint Core, the Cosmos SDK & IBC, we’ve also been able to give teams the technical support they needed to build quality applications and launch their testnets.
For other projects that were further ahead, we’ve been there to run through their mainnet launch plan and their go-to-market strategy, as well as connect them to auditors and our validator network to make sure their chains are launched with an optimal security setup in mind.
Another major value-add that we deliver to teams has been through fundraising. On average, we’ve spent about 3 sessions with each team that was in the process of fundraising, going through their pitch deck and making sure it was able to catch the attention of our network of investors. We’ve made countless connections between venture funds and the projects that we are helping, and we’re proud to see these mutually beneficial partnerships play out.
Program Structure
The program is set up in a tailored way where each team gets support on the verticals they need. We delight in the fact that our program is lean and efficient: there is no mandatory curriculum of workshops each team goes through, we simply ask you where you need support, and that’s where we help.
We operate on a quarterly basis, taking in the new cohort of teams that made it through the selection process. Each quarter we have introduction calls with the new applicants, after which we assess what their needs are and how many we’re able to take into the program. Although there is no end date to our program — our partnerships last as long as needed — we’ve noticed that most projects primarily require attention in the first three months. We continue to support projects throughout their entire lifecycle whenever anything comes up. In total, we currently have 50+ teams under our wings, of which about 20 we have regular calls with on a weekly basis.
The Road Ahead
We’re excited about the the next 12 months as we’ll onboard many more teams to the program and expand our our own team and our partnership network. Some of these projects are planning to launch with Interchain Security, and through that we hope to contribute to the success of the Cosmos Hub as well. It’s a particularly interesting security setup that requires novel token designs, and we’re looking forward to brainstorming with teams on the creative solutions this frontier technology requires.
We’ll soon be announcing the first cohort of 2023, and we’re eager to share more about the projects we support, the research we’ve done and the milestones we’ve achieved. We’re building up a vast knowledge base with critical information that helps founders on many different fronts, and we wouldn’t be a Web3 company if we didn’t share this information freely with the wider community.
If you’re interested in keeping up, we suggest giving our brand new Twitter a follow and subscribing to our Medium page. And of course, if you’re keen to join the program, you can apply through our website at any point in time.
