Latest news with #HackVC
Business Insider
18-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
TAC Raises $11.5M to Bring DeFi to Telegram's Billion-User Ecosystem
New York, USA, June 18th, 2025, Chainwire TAC, a purpose-built blockchain for EVM dApps to access TON and Telegram ecosystem, has raised a total of $11.5 million across its seed and strategic rounds. The newly closed $5 million strategic round, led by Hack VC, reinforces institutional belief in TAC's mission to enhance blockchain functionality inside Telegram, the most user-rich environment in crypto. 'At Hack VC, we invest in teams building the future of the internet,' said Ed Roman, Managing Partner at Hack VC. 'TAC is an exceptional team with a deep understanding of infrastructure and growth backed by years of experience building in the space. Leading this strategic round reflects our conviction in TAC's ability to shape how Ethereum dApps reach global users through Telegram and TON.' TAC is nearing its mainnet launch, now underway in a phased rollout. In the current DevMainnet phase, blue-chip DeFi protocols like Curve, Morpho, and Euler are already deploying, with over 20 leading applications preparing for Mainnet integration. This early traction ensures that once TAC goes live publicly, the ecosystem will launch with deep liquidity, proven DeFi primitives, and immediate user utility inside Telegram. 'TAC is committed to giving EVM developers the tools and reach to deploy their applications into Telegram's billion-user ecosystem,' said Pavel Altukhov, Co-Founder and CEO of TAC. 'This strategic round accelerates our mission to bring Ethereum applications to everyday users and lays the groundwork for the next wave of TON-native consumer apps.' TAC's pre-mainnet liquidity bootstrapping campaign, The Summoning, has drawn significant interest from leading funds, liquidity providers, and infrastructure players across the industry. With over $700M in total value locked (TVL) secured ahead of public Mainnet launch, this institutional-grade backing reflects deep confidence in TAC's role as a DeFi layer for TON. Crucially, this liquidity will power core DeFi applications from day one, enabling real yield and market functionality at launch "Going live on Telegram and TON via TAC can allow Curve to reach the new audience who aren't yet on DeFi,' said Michael Egorov, Founder of Curve. 'TAC chose a great approach of bringing battle-tested EVM applications there. We are happy to be one of the first to deploy and bring Curve to these new users" Curve, Morpho, and Euler have already built dedicated Telegram Mini Apps (TMAs), making their products natively accessible in Telegram. In parallel, popular consumer TMAs are beginning to integrate DeFi functionality on the backend, distributing yield and financial tools to non-crypto users. TAC sees this convergence within the superapp Telegram as the path to mass adoption. About TAC TAC is a purpose-built blockchain for EVM dApps to access TON and Telegram Ecosystem's 1B+ user base. TAC makes it seamless for Ethereum dApps to be deployed on TON. EVM functionality and liquidity brought to the TON ecosystem enable builders to focus on consumer use cases. Contact PR CC Chen TAC
Yahoo
13-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Where Top VCs Think Crypto x AI Is Headed Next
The proliferation of mainstream artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the last couple of years has stirred the crypto and blockchain industry to explore decentralized alternatives to Big Tech products. The synergy between AI and blockchain is built on addressing the risk of centralized ownership and access to data that powers AI. The theory goes that decentralization can mitigate against the entire AI economy being powered by the data owned by a few tech behemoths like Alphabet (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), Alibaba (9988) and Tencent (0700). It is unclear as yet whether or not this will prove to be a significant problem at all, much less whether the blockchain industry will be able to solve it. What is clear, however, is that crypto venture capitalists (VCs) are willing to spend millions of dollars finding out. Decentralized AI has thus far attracted $917 million in VC and private equity money, according to startup deal platform Tracxn. The question remains whether the trend of investing in blockchain-based AI is still built on hype or has now transcended to being the real deal. Blockchain investment company Theta Capital described AI x crypto as "the inevitable backbone of AI," in a recent "Satellite View" report, which explored insights and outlooks from the sector's prominent investors. AI agents "No trend stands out more than the intersection of AI and crypto," the report said, using the examples of AI agents trading on blockchains and even launching tokens. This may appear to be a more sophisticated form of speculation for degens, but Theta argues it's a route to tackling some of AI's problems that only crypto can solve. "Crypto wallets enable the participation of autonomous agents in financial markets," according to the report. "Decentralized token networks are bootstrapping the supply side of key AI infrastructure for compute, data and energy." The report's conclusion is far from being hype and speculation; AI x crypto is "the new meta." Meta is short for "metagame," a term borrowed from gaming referring to the dominant way of playing with regard to characters, strategies or moves based on the competitive landscape. Decentralized AI Alex Pack, managing partner of blockchain venture capital firm Hack VC, described Web3 AI as "the biggest source of alpha in investing today," in the "Satellite View" report. Hack VC has dedicated 41% of its latest fund to Web3 AI, according to the report, in which it sees the main challenge as building a decentralized alternative to the AI economy. "AI's rapid evolution is creating massive efficiencies, but also increasing centralization," Pack said. "The intersection of crypto and AI is by far the biggest investment opportunity in the space, offering an open, decentralized alternative." One of Hack VC's most prominent portfolio companies is Grass, which encourages users to participate in AI networks by offering up their unused internet bandwidth in return for tokens. This is designed as an alternative to large firms installing software code into apps in order to scrape their users' data. "Users unwittingly donate their bandwidth without compensation," Grass founder Andrej Radonjic said in Theta's report. "Grass provides an alternative [by] forming a massive opt-in, peer-to-peer network able to produce high-quality data at the scale of Google and Microsoft." The dreaded AI "takeover" Decentralized AI presents risks for investors, Theta concedes. It could lead to the proliferation of all the least desirable facets of the internet as it already exists: putrid online discourse, spam emails or vapid social media content in the form of blogs, videos or memes. In the crypto world, an example of this may be the creation of meme tokens. The questionable endorsements, the wash trading and the pump and dumps can all be handled by AI engines even more efficiently than humans. Some VCs see blockchain as the basis for mitigation. Olaf Carlson-Wee, CEO and founder of Polychain, provided the examples of proof-of-humanity mechanisms to verify that users are human and disincentivizing spam through micropayments or spam. "If sending an email costs $0.01, it would destroy the economics of spam while remaining affordable for average users," he said in the report. With blockchain possibly providing some of these safeguards, Carlson-Wee believes AI will underpin digital and financial systems, as they could outperform humans in markets. This reality, he claims, would be gladly accepted, as opposed to dreaded as some sort of bleak dystopia. "Over time, AI systems will evolve into long-term capital allocators, predicting trends and opportunities years into the future, [which] humans will entrust their funds to, because of the superior ability to make data-driven decisions," Carlson-Wee said. "The AI takeover won't be a war we lose - it will be a suggestion we agree to," he concluded.
