🪪 L1 for ID

GM, and welcome back to The Drop.

The vibes at Permissionless are pretty immaculate, despite it being 100°F (38°C) yesterday, plus humidity. We all melted into the concrete by 4 p.m., but it was worth it.

So far, a lot of the conversations here have been practical and related to how crypto will obtain mainstream adoption. To do this, the industry will have to keep integrating with the likes of Visa and Mastercard. We also still need a truly breakout game — and a different approach to NFTs. 

I get the sense people are craving nuts-and-bolts answers on strategy and product — as well as vibe checks from industry leaders — to guide their business decisions.

We’re seeing a lot of surprising relationships forming between crypto founders and TradFi execs as crypto pushes toward mainstream recognition.

— Kate Irwin

MOCA plots digital identity-focused L1

Moca Foundation — the group behind the MOCA token affiliated with Animoca Brands’ Moca ID and Mocaverse — is launching Moca Chain.

The namesake L1 blockchain is focused on being a cross-chain identity layer and verification system. The MOCA token will be the chain’s native token.

In an X Space Wednesday morning, Animoca Brands cofounder and Chair Yat Siu explained that for crypto users, Moca Chain can be an alternative to giving your personal data — and therefore identity — to big tech firms like Google and Meta. 

For businesses, it can be a way to reach target audiences without needing to see or store all of their personal data. 

“Our digital identity is all over the place right now,” Siu said, adding that he sees Moca Chain as a way for crypto users to own and control their own digital data. In the future, he expects more “walled gardens” or closed tech/data ecosystems, like those belonging to Apple or Meta, to be forced to open up. 

The blockchain’s testnet is expected to launch this year in Q3, with a mainnet launch near the end of this year in Q4. Moca Foundation describes the blockchain as both EVM-compatible and chain-agnostic, as well as modular. 

Moca Chain will also offer decentralized data storage, a feature we’ve seen recently with the launches of protocols like Walrus. On the tech side, the Moca blockchain is also planning to use ZK proofs, zkTLS and an oracle for user identities.

These adds aim to keep user data private. Third-party Moca Chain issuers will be the verifiers of user identities, earning as they provide that service. 

To me, Moca’s plans here sound like a crypto-powered alternative to Google’s single sign-on (SSO) offering that’s spread across the industry lately. For crypto firms like Immutable and Abstract, SSO has been an answer to the clunky legacy wallet onboarding processes of the past. 

But not everyone necessarily wants to tie all their Google Search history, cloud storage and email account to a crypto wallet. 

While we won’t be able to claw our data back from the big tech giants without substantial US regulation (similar to what the EU has done), I’d say an easy-to-use, decentralized digital-identity option that puts privacy first is always welcome.

Thousands are headed to Brooklyn.

Infra, token design, AI, Bitcoin, and $100K+ in hackathon bounties on day one. Hackers get in free. Everyone else? Clock’s ticking.

📅 June 24–26 | Brooklyn

AI agent trading app on Base raises $1.3M

The AI-powered trading app Flagship has raised $1.3 million in seed funding to build its mobile apps with AI “Alpha Agents.”

Venly Ventures, Contango Digital and MN Capital participated in the round.

On the upcoming app, AI moves are tracked and transparent for users. Flagship is using Base and will have a token, $FYI. 

The startup has developed its own “Crypto Brain” tech to power its AI agents. Those agents can then be deployed to give users returns on crypto trades.

“The Crypto Brain is our shared intelligence layer that powers all Agents and gets smarter over time. It learns from trade history, market shifts, and real-time data from over 17K sources, including on-chain activity and 12M+ crypto trades,” Flagship CEO Jorn van Zwanenburg told me via email.

“Everything flows into a central data lake, where our machine learning models identify what we call hyper-indicators patterns that predict price movements before they go mainstream. These insights feed into a scoring engine that ranks opportunities by sentiment, technicals, and risk, so Agents can trade autonomously with built-in safeguards,” Zwanenburg added. 

MN Capital, a VC firm based in the Netherlands, called Flagship a “unique use case” because of its mobile-first approach to AI agent-powered trading.

Byzentine Founding Partner Devin, whose firm also invested in the startup, said: “Flagship’s vision to open up AI-driven wealth creation is huge, and we are stoked to back it.”

Crypto MapleStory exec departs

Nexon exec Dominic Jang, who was the VP and Chief Business Officer of MapleStory’s crypto version MapleStory N, has left the game and studio.

Jang’s departure comes roughly five weeks after MapleStory N’s launch. He cited needing time to recharge with family and said he’s now building something new in stealth.