25 blockchain startups in YourStory & Buidlers Tribe's list of top Web3 innovations
A specially curated list of 25 promising, Indian founder-led startups in the blockchain segment featured in YourStory and Web3 incubator Buidlers Tribe's joint report named the 'Top 25 Web 3 Innovations'. Here's more:
On April 20, 2022, YourStory and Web3 incubator unveiled the Top 25 Web3 Innovations report, a specially curated list of 25 promising, Indian founder-led startups in the blockchain segment.
The 25 finalists will each receive a non-tradeable NFT as an award commemorating and proving their status as a finalist of the Top 25 Web 3 Innovations cohort.
For awarding the 25 startup finalists with NFTs, YourStory has partnered with Wize, an NFT infrastructure and API toolkit startup that offers POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) NFTs, Identity NFTs, Certificate NFTs, Award NFTs, Ticket NFTs, etc.
Some of the finalists also stand to win grants from Buidlers Tribe's BeliefDAO initiative, which provides Convertible Grants to founders who it believes can make it big.
YourStory's partners for the report include Woodstock Fund, Hashed Emergent, and Chiratae Ventures.
Download the report here to access the full list of the 25 high-potential Web3 projects.
Key insights from the report
Blockchain emerges as a ‘universal tech’: For more than 70 percent of applicants, their current blockchain venture is their first. More than 90 percent believe that blockchain is the most necessary to solve the problem in focus.
Further, application use cases are no longer limited to just crypto, fintech, or NFTs. Startups are now using blockchain-based tools to solve for the rising water crisis in urban metros as well as other problem areas in edtech, gaming, creator economies, ecommerce, sports, online ticketing, supply chain, etc – the list is now endless.
Startups prefer to be ‘chain agnostic’: Around 22 percent of applicants are building their platform in a blockchain agnostic manner. While Ethereum and Polygon continue to be the most preferred choice to build a blockchain platform, many startups prefer to use a combination of both or other blockchains such as Tron, Solana, Terra, Hyperledger, BNB Chain, and more.
More focus on ‘customer centric’ solutions: More than 70 percent of applicants are creating one of B2C, B2B2C, D2C or C2C solutions with blockchain tech. From being considered a backend technology for crypto use cases, blockchain has now become a technological enabler to build trust and transparency in customer-centric applications.
Many projects work with small team structures: More than 70 percent of startups have a team size below 20. Although increasingly popular, blockchain is still nascent as a category and the talent pool is short.
However, it is now one of the fastest-growing skill sets among developers. With the future of work being hybrid and location agnostic, leading tech-enabled industries such as fintech, crypto, and IT will continue experimenting in new domains while hiring and growing new talents.
Revenue generation is still a challenge: More than 50 percent of applicants accepted that revenue generation is still a challenge in the industry. Most revenue-generating startups have annual revenues below $250,000.
Except for crypto and NFT firms, many other sectors in blockchain are still experimenting and trying to analyse use cases for ensuring a guaranteed healthy revenue stream. The most popular revenue channels among blockchain startups are commissions on transactions, advertising, affiliate marketing, and fees for services.
A visible gap in funding: Approximately 40 percent of the startups are bootstrapped while more than 50 percent of startups have raised not more than $10 million in funding. This is at a time when the quantum of funding in the Indian startup ecosystem has more than doubled through 2020-2021, and India has added close to 100 unicorns.
On global expansion: More than 40 percent of startups have already expanded their presence globally, while equal numbers are looking to expand to international markets this financial year.