GCR

Outlier Ventures is pleased to announce applications are open for the Polkadot x Base Camp Accelerator, its second collaboration cohort following the successful launch of the Filecoin Base Camp accelerator.

Outlier Ventures is scaling the largest multichain network of founders, investors, and experts in Web3. To date, Outlier Ventures has accelerated 70+ Web3 startups since 2014 and has grown a network of thousands of blockchain founders through its Ascent advisory program and quarterly Diffusion community event. Outlier Ventures is uniquely positioned to stimulate developer activity and growth on the Polkadot network by collaborating with mentors from Parity, the Web3 Foundation, Substrate Builders, and other Polkadot ecosystem players to host this rigorous 5-month accelerator program.  

Over the last year, the Polkadot network has experienced a moment of exponential growth. The highly anticipated parachain auctions and recent Karura/Kusama launches on the Acala Network are driving heightened network activity, and hundreds of millions of dedicated venture capital is anticipated to enter the space to fund startups building on Polkadot and leveraging its unique governance capabilities. 

Following its investments in Unique Network (the NFT parachain for Polkadot) and Polkadex (a Polkadot-based DEX), Outlier Ventures is looking for a variety of teams using Polkadot technologies— from crypto-natives to Web2 founders and enterprise professionals— to build high growth startups and decentralised applications and networks.

The Polkadot x Base Camp Accelerator is now open for applications and the program will begin in September 2021. Up to 10 teams will join an intensive five-month program that supports founders with fundraising, community growth, token design and implementation, business model innovation and governance, in addition to gaining access to Outlier Ventures’ mentor network of leading Web3 founders. The accelerator will also serve as a catalyst for founders developing their projects within the context of Outlier Ventures’ Open Metaverse thesis, a toolkit for design alternatives based on principles of user-centricity and sovereignty of identity, data and wealth.

Projects will be selected for the cohort based upon their ability to grow the Polkadot ecosystem, with a focus on the following use cases and tooling:

Infrastructure Middleware:

• Developer Tools and Services
• DAO Infrastructure
• Gaming Infrastructure
• Privacy Enhancing Infrastructure

Middleware:

• Wallets & Access Services
• Sustainability and Environmental Impact

DeFi:

• Yield aggregators
• Credit Risk Profiling / Reputation onchain
• Insurance initiatives
• Fixed Interest
• DeFi/gaming combos
• Decentralised perpetual contracts

Services:

• Crowd loan services supporting DOT 
• NFT Franchise
• Media Studio & Franchises 
• Services around DeFi on DOT 

Gaming: 

• Play to earn game and middleware
• No loss lotteries
• Game studios

Jamie Burke, Founder and CEO of Outlier Ventures, said of the collaboration with Polkadot, “We have been seeing both huge demand from our co-investor network for Polkadot and Kusama based deal-flow and have also been experiencing an increasing number of high-quality startups apply to Basecamp over the last couple of quarters. Our job is to connect that supply with the demand to seed the ecosystem with the growth capital it needs to succeed”. 

Outlier Ventures is committed to investing in a diverse founder base and strongly encourages teams from all backgrounds to apply, with an emphasis on those from communities that are underrepresented in Web3 and technology startups more broadly.

For more information, please visit outlierventures.io/base-camp.