Key Takeaways
- 10X Founders Demo Day v2.0 – August 25, online. Applications close August 20.
- Eight selected founders pitch live: 5 minutes on stage, 2 minutes of questions from the judging panel.
- $150,000+ reward pool – grants, cash, audits, oracle infrastructure, API access, media and growth services.
- Eight judges confirmed, with further names to be announced – Animoca Brands, Contribution Capital, Comma3 Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Funders VC, Zee Prime Capital, Dracoon Ventures and Moonhill Capital.
- Every project reaching the stage is scored by the full panel and receives written feedback – not only the winner.
- Built by Inspira Labs, Yellow and Cicada. Sonic holds the Anchor Partner seat, with Injective, Hacken, Galxe, 1inch, Cointelegraph Accelerator, Cryptic and Atlas (backed by CoinMarketCap) as co-hosts.
- Open to founders with a working product or early traction.
What’s Actually in the $150,000
The pool passes $150,000 in combined value, and the composition is the point. Every position maps to something a product genuinely requires on the way to market – the costs founders tend to discover only once they arrive there, usually with less runway than they had planned for.
Sonic, as Anchor Partner, commits a $20,000 ecosystem grant to the winning team, a seat in its builder program and hands-on technical support to launch. Ecosystem access extends to every finalist on stage.
Injective adds up to $20,000, following its own internal due diligence on the team.
Hacken contributes $15,000 in audit credits – the smart contract review exchanges and institutional partners expect to see before they list or integrate anything. Comparable work on the open market runs into five figures and routinely holds a launch for months while it clears.
Atlas, the oracle provider backed by CoinMarketCap, brings $5,000 in first-party price feeds sourced from over 905 exchanges, plus a complimentary CoinMarketCap listing. Building equivalent data access in-house is a multi-month engineering project before it is a budget line.
Cointelegraph Accelerator puts in $10,000 in media credits – placement inside one of the largest crypto media ecosystems in the industry.
Galxe adds its Essentials Plus package, $6,000 in the campaign and quest tooling used to build a community rather than announce one.
1inch provides $5,000 in API access on its Custom Plan, built on top of one of the most widely used swap layers in DeFi.
Cryptic closes it with a $5,000 marketing and growth package for the stretch where a finished product still has to find its users.
The three hosts, Inspira Labs, Yellow and Cicada, contribute a combined $60,000 across market making, advisory, acceleration and go-to-market support.
The pool works as acceleration rather than a payout. Everything in it is something a team would have to find and pay for on its own sooner or later, and the search usually costs a team more than the invoice does.
Here that part is already handled. The pieces are arranged in advance and come with direct access to the teams providing them, so a founder can use each one at the point it’s actually needed.
No single item on this list transforms a company on its own – nothing works that way. The pool answers that by covering them ahead of time, and leaving the team’s own capital where it belongs.
Who Does the Scoring
Eight judges are confirmed for v2.0, with additional names to be announced ahead of the event.
Ian Yeung – Associate Director, Investment & Strategic Partnership, Animoca Brands. Over 600 portfolio companies across Web3 gaming, digital property rights and consumer apps – the seat that reads retention.
Roman Evdokimov – Venture Partner, Contribution Capital. Checks of $250,000 to $500,000 across DeFi, Ethereum scaling, privacy and DePIN, on a stated thirty-day decision window.
Ivan Li – Founding Partner, Comma3 Ventures. Early-stage crypto since 2017 across Taipei, Singapore and San Francisco; 50+ portfolio companies, early in Polygon and Klaytn.
Chloe Wang – Investment Director, Portfolio Manager and PR Director, Fenbushi Capital. Asia’s first blockchain-dedicated fund, founded 2015; Circle, ConsenSys and CoinList among its positions.
Aleksandr Nechaev – a Partner at Funders VC, $20M AUM asset management firm sitting at the intersection of venture and liquid DeFi.
Tadas Ramonas – Analyst, Zee Prime Capital. Gibraltar-based and thesis-driven, with 100+ early positions and research published openly, usually before a category has a name.
Dr. David An – Managing Partner, Dracoon Ventures & Co-Founder, The Provocation Lab. 25+ years across AI, Web3, and VC with leadership roles at Binance, Greenfield Capital, and T-Venture focusing on AI strategy, product positioning, and scalable growth.
René – CEO, Moonhill Capital. 18 years of corporate leadership at Red Bull and Unilever alongside 10+ years in Web3 and crypto investing, evaluating operational execution, scaling, and growth plans.
Each judge scores every team independently against the same criteria. No team is assigned a single reviewer; with eight companies on stage and eight judges evaluating each, every team benefits from a broad and balanced assessment.
The committee will ultimately decide which founders walk away with the prize pool, playing a pivotal role in the success and integrity of the 10X Founders Demo Day.
Where 10X Founders Came From
The event started from a pattern its organizers kept encountering in their day-to-day work with early-stage teams.
Founders came to them with products that functioned and companies that didn’t – not for lack of engineering, but because the two aren’t the same thing.
Some hadn’t yet reached the questions that decide whether a product becomes a business: how it scales, who distributes it, what happens at the raise.
Others had reached them and stalled, aware of exactly what was missing and without access to anyone who had solved it before.
A third group had both handled and was still exposed, because a roadmap written six months ago was aimed at a market that had since moved.
None of it resolves by building harder. What each situation needed was the same thing: a candid read from people who assess companies for a living, delivered early enough to change something.
Those reads do exist in this industry. They are simply scattered – capital held in one conversation, chain selection in another, liquidity, security and distribution somewhere else entirely.
A founder assembles them one introduction at a time over several months, and the decision usually gets made before the last one arrives.
Inspira Labs, Yellow and Cicada put all of them in a single session instead.
What v1.0 Delivered
The first 10X Founders edition ran earlier this year, and the organizers treated it as a test rather than a launch.
More than 150 teams applied. Twelve reached the stage after screening on product, team, traction, token model and market fit.
The judging panel – Varys Capital, Funders VC, Starknet Foundation, Magnus Capital, Coinsilium and Draper Associates, scored independently and converged on the same winner, Backyard Finance, from a $125,000 pool.
Over 7,000 people watched live.
The numbers weren’t the part that mattered. What mattered arrived over the following weeks: judges reaching out to founders directly, scorecard feedback turning into product decisions, and teams that hadn’t won closing partnerships that originated in that room.
The session ended. The conversations didn’t.
It also surfaced something about prize design. A cash-weighted reward quietly assumes the winning team sits at exactly the stage to deploy it and strong teams frequently don’t.
What holds its value regardless of timing is the infrastructure a company will need whenever it does get there.
It’s also why the scorecard became a fixed component rather than a courtesy. In most formats, everyone except the winner leaves with exposure.
Here, every team that pitches is measured against the same criteria by the full panel and receives that assessment in writing – the kind of read that ordinarily takes months of cold outreach to obtain.
Why There’s a 2nd Edition
v1 proved the model. It also exposed a ceiling, and the ceiling belonged to the organizers rather than the founders: more ecosystems wanted a seat than there was a table, and twelve pitches turned out to be more than any panel can score with full attention inside a single session.
v2.0 answers both. The table is heavier rather than longer – a larger pool, an anchor ecosystem seated inside the evaluation itself, and a deeper co-host bench, while the stage is deliberately tighter at eight slots.
The filter narrows as the pool behind it grows, which is the intention: a scorecard is worth more when the panel has the time to write it properly.
The early response suggests the demand was real. Applications passed 100 within four days of opening, entirely organic, with banner placements running on CryptoRank and Incrypted and amplification from CoinMarketCap, Sonic, Injective and all parties in the first 48 hours.
The structural addition is the Anchor Partner seat, held by Sonic. It targets a decision most teams make with less scrutiny than it warrants: chain selection determines a project’s economics, its foundation support and its distribution reach for years, yet is frequently handled as a branding exercise.
A team picks the most visible ecosystem, announces the partnership, and discovers afterward that a foundation managing thousands of projects has no bandwidth allocated to theirs.
The chain gains a builder; the builder gains a logo.
Placing one ecosystem inside the evaluation process moves that decision forward. Sonic reviews applications alongside the judging panel and backs the teams it reads as ready – while founders are still choosing where to deploy, rather than after they have committed.
Around it sits a deeper co-host bench spanning infrastructure, DeFi, security, media and growth, with campaign distribution running through Cointelegraph, CoinMarketCap, CryptoRank, Incrypted and NS3.
Applying
10X Founders Demo Day v2.0 runs online on August 25. Applications close August 20, and selected teams are notified directly by the Inspira Labs team via Telegram.
The organizers are looking for founders with a working product or demonstrated traction, planning a token generation event within the next three to six months, and prepared to defend what they have built in front of active investors.
Seven minutes is not enough time to build a company. It is enough to change what a company does with the seven months that follow.
Event link: luma.com/mie9hpvt
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