Techstars recently partnered with Aleph Zero, a web3 ecosystem that’s spearheading projects focused on low latency, data confidentiality, and ease of development. Aleph Zero joined the Techstars Web3 accelerator’s Class of 2024 as an Innovation Member to ensure that the next iteration of the Internet is built on sound foundations. We sat down with Antoni Zolciak to learn more about the ecosystem and its involvement with Techstars.

What is Aleph Zero?

Aleph Zero is a blockchain infrastructure where web3 development teams can build fast and scalable applications, while receiving support from the Ecosystem Funding Program and a very active community. For users, it’s a place where they can interact with a growing variety of web3 applications that are uniquely respectful of their data.  

What’s special about working with Techstars and the Web3 Accelerator program?

Techstars has been a home to one of the most successful global startups from every possible industry. On one hand, we get to dive into the best acceleration practices that Techstars established over the years of helping to build unicorn companies. On the other hand, we get to assist the founders in their new adventure—and are looking forward to learning from them ourselves, too. It’s an amazing opportunity to impact the web3 ecosystem positively in multiple ways.

What excites you about this incredible group of startups and what do you hope to see more of?

I think we’re seeing a lot of startups that make use of web3’s data confidentiality capabilities and that’s always a good thing. It’s one of the main value-adds of the space. You just can’t get that outside of a web3 paradigm because it needs to be embedded into applications from the ground up. So seeing data confidentiality applied to anything from biotech to AI, as we see in this group of founders, is definitely an exciting development and something we hope to see more of.

How does the Aleph Zero ecosystem support startups like these?

We’ve been heads down for a long time building the kind of infrastructure that allows startups like these to build easily and with confidence. The Aleph Zero blockchain is designed to provide certain guarantees such as low latency, data confidentiality, and ease of development from the get-go. That’s all thanks to network design choices such as our implementation of the AlephBFT consensus algorithm to using the Rust-based ink! language for our smart contract capabilities.

But more importantly, we’re all about supporting and shepherding new projects that are building with us — beyond just funding. Our own Ecosystem Funding Program is a pretty comprehensive source of support for A0 projects and it’s borne a lot of fruit. We work with projects that are coming up with solutions to some of web3’s most pressing problems, so when we look at projects like the Techstars Web3 accelerator program’s founders, we already have a lot figured out in terms of how we can support them commercially and technically.

What would you tell teams that are looking to participate in the next Techstars Web3 accelerator?

Where you build and who you build with matters as much as what you build. Participating in the Techstars Web3 accelerator is already a step in the right direction, in this sense.

Antoni Zolciak is a co-founder of the Aleph Zero Foundation and Cardinal Cryptography. Aleph Zero is a privacy-enhancing Layer 1 blockchain renowned for prioritizing scalability, security, and speed. For more information about Aleph Zero, visit https://alephzero.org/

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