Polygon Devs Shine at Alliance DAO’s Demo Day

Polygon Labs

November 11, 2022

On Nov. 10, 2022, as the crypto space was going through its Lehman Brothers moment with the collapse of FTX, a group of builders were focusing on the next chapter in Web3’s history. At the Alliance DAO demo day, teams pitched their solutions to real-world problems, with Polygon developers delivering some of the most memorable projects.

The event was a culmination of a twice-a-year three-month Web3 accelerator program by Alliance DAO. This year, only 17 teams were chosen from over 900 applicants. They were helped along by mentors that included crypto luminaries such as Polygon Studios CEO Ryan Wyatt, Brevan Howard Digital’s co-head of ventures Colleen Sullivan, Solana’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and the founder and CEO of Messari Ryan Selkis.

The projects tackled subjects ranging from crypto payroll and advertising to authentication and decentralized machine learning. Startups focusing on Ethereum accounted for about 38% of the total and those on Polygon were 21%.

This strong showing is a direct reflection of everything Polygon does to expand and support its developer community. In the previous quarter alone, the team distributed over $850,000 through hackathon prizes and accelerators. Our three biggest initiatives in the quarter -- the Polygon Fellowship, BUIDL IT hackathon, and Polygon Bootcamp Africa -- attracted over 20,000 developer registrations. The team was also on the ground reaching thousands of developers through more than 35 workshops, hackathon side events, panels, fireside chats, and university appearances.

Let’s meet some of the projects building the future of Web3 on Polygon.

Slise

Concerns over personal data have led major browsers to block tracking cookies and Apple even went as far as letting users to opt out altogether. The gains for privacy should be celebrated, but they also made ads more expensive and less effective. Slise may have the answer that will make both users and advertisers happy.

The startup is building a programmatic advertising platform that analyzes on-chain activity to deliver better ads for Web3. That means doing away with tracking, rewarding viewers for their attention and offering dApps sustainable monetization. NFTs play a central role by making limited data records visible by default while storing them in a decentralized manner. Users can feel more at peace about knowing there is complete transparency over which data is shared and which data is private.

The project is particularly close to our hearts because it was the winner of Polygon’s Buidl It hackathon this summer. Slise co-founders Oleksii Sidorov, ex-Facebook AI Research and a Y Combinator alum, and Griffin Kao, former Google Ads PM where he worked on data privacy for Ads, are a perfect example of Web2 talent building the app layer and supporting infrastructure Web3 needs to onboard the next billion users.

“We felt the support from Polygon from the first days of building,” Oleksii said in an email. “What really resonated with us was Polygon’s focus on business value and building bridges between Web2 and Web3. We see a lot of opportunities for collaborations in the future and have confidence in Polygon’s support, which is unmatched by other chains.”

Mensari

Mensari wants to be the QuickBooks for Web3. The product helps organizations cut through the growing complexity of crypto bookkeeping by bringing all of their activity to one place. It supports multiple cost-basis methods, offers a real-time view of portfolio balances including unrealised gains or losses and makes auditing easy. The platform is available on Ethereum and Polygon.

SlashAuth

SlashAuth promises to save projects hundreds of hours in development and maintenance by using their Web3 authentication platform that allows for distributed and secure identities that cross the Web2-Web3 boundary. It offers the ability to token gate content, manage users, customize appearance and track analytics. SlashAuth is currently in closed beta.

Chain ML

Chain ML is building a scalable, censorship-resistant protocol for machine learning and related complex data-driven computation for Web3. The team is partnering with leading Web3 protocols as design partners to apply machine learning to DeFi, gaming, social, and data infrastructure. It aims to launch an early version of its product in the first three months of the next year.

Niural

Niural is developing a compliant crypto payroll platform that offers real-time payroll for both fiat and crypto, contractor and vendor payments globally. The payment protocol runs on Polygon, which means paychecks without hefty gas fees or environmental impact costs.

Head over to our Developers page to learn how you can get started building on Polygon and tune into our blog for latest news from our ecosystem

Let’s bring the world to Ethereum!