Updates from the Meta-MESH: January

The MESH network comprises a portfolio of over 190 positions, 250+ founders, and a community of 5,000+ people. With a network of this size, there is always important news to share, so we decided to bring you a digestible monthly recap of our community updates. From portfolio company milestones to new job opportunities to the latest articles from the MESH team, you’ll find it all below…

Updates from the MetaMesh Portfolio:

• Gitcoin just kicked off their seminal Program Alpha Round. It’s a set of 3 Quadratic Funding grants rounds that will allocate a $1M total matching pool to 200 grantees. This is a the next step in a series of rounds that are testing the new Gitcoin protocol. The UNICEF and Fantom rounds in December were a huge success.
• Connext is making big waves this year as they prepare to grow into a fully decentralized ecosystem with the Amarok upgrade. More on that here.
• Friederike Ernst from GnosisDAO gave a fantastic talk on Credibly Neutral Platforms for Science on DeSci in London. There has been some pretty stellar content coming out of the Gnosis ecosystem at large, like this 15-min fundamentals on CoW Protocol with Anna George.
• Tribute Labs recently launched The Hive Mind, a new media publication and weekly newsletter covering DAOs, projects and trends emerging in web3. Read the first here.
• On January 27th, Community Gaming will be hosting a web3 content creator cup, in partnership with the Gamers’ Choice Awards and GamerPay, among others.
• StarkWare is hosting their second round of StarkWare Sessions in Tel Aviv in early February, bringing together members of the Ethereum and StarkNet communities for panels and workshops. More information here.
• Tachyon alum Mona just launched the first ever immersive identity space. Curate your avatar and explore digital art galleries here.

R&D Updates:

• Veramo hosted a Twitter spaces last week on Improving governance in DAOs. Read the summary here.
• Veramo is currently running an experimental bounty program to encourage and reward the people helping to improve the framework. Read all about it here.
• Enterprise ZK team is working on several open source efforts in the Baseline Protocol community which include developing Baseline Reference Implementation-3, defining requirements for an international supply chain use case, and producing research on zero trust frameworks (see ‘Digital Business at a Crossroads’ here).
• Enterprise ZK team is focusing on research around using the zkEVM as the execution framework for Baseline Protocol implementations for industries such as telecommunications, mobility, and insurance. A blog is coming soon.
• Magmo deployed their State Channels contracts to Filecoin’s EVM-compatible Wallaby testnet and successfully ran end-to-end tests — hitting sub 100ms target for their “Time to First Payment” benchmark. Learn more by watching this video.
• Magmo have been exploring and contributing to Protocol Lab’s “testground” framework for simulating and stress-testing distributed systems such as State Channel networks. Learn more by watching this video.