YZi Labs Opens Applications for EASY Residency S5
YZi Labs has launched the fifth season of EASY Residency, open for applications from early founding teams in programmable capital, on-chain markets, AI infrastructure, consumer AI, and AI×biotech.
The program lasts for 10 weeks, with the first 5 weeks of online collaboration, followed by 5 weeks of development in Thailand, concluding with a Demo Day for global investors; the application deadline is September 13 at 23:59, GMT-7.
Selected teams can receive up to $500,000 in investment: $150,000 for 5% equity via a SAFE, and up to $350,000 with no valuation cap via a SAFE; they may also qualify for a maximum of $2 million SAFE with no valuation cap from a model aggregation platform.
The program will focus on projects in programmable capital such as stablecoin payments, on-chain foreign exchange and fund management, tokenized stocks and RWA applications, institutional-grade on-chain options, privacy infrastructure, and post-quantum migration tools.
The AI direction focuses on computing power procurement and routing, GPU capacity forwards and risk hedging, trusted agent permission systems, robotic data infrastructure, privacy-first memory layers, voice agents, as well as medical, biological experiments, and clinical development workflows.
In terms of market mechanisms, YZi Labs uses small equity investments, additional capital with no valuation cap, residency resources, and Demo Day to secure priority investment rights and follow-on financing access for early projects. Beneficiaries are early teams needing capital, distribution, and technical resources; the burden falls on homogeneous AI and Web3 projects lacking real workflows, data sources, compliance paths, or liquidity design.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
EASY Residency is not the first attempt at a "geographic residency + thematic investment" model. The fourth season was set in Bhutan, focusing on sovereign tech cities, stablecoin payments, on-chain credit, AI infrastructure, robotics, and AI×biotech; the fifth season moves to Thailand, indicating that YZi Labs is expanding its residency projects from a single national experiment to a Southeast Asian development and financing hub.
The design of the capital path has a clear option structure. The initial $150,000 corresponds to a 5% equity stake at an estimated post-investment valuation of about $3 million, while the subsequent $350,000 and up to $2 million in additional investment use a SAFE with no valuation cap, allowing investors to secure follow-on participation rights before the project achieves a higher market valuation. For founders, this means obtaining cash and resources upfront; the trade-off is the uncertainty of potential dilution in future financing.
YZi Labs focuses its funding on four types of "new constraints": programmable capital requires deeper market structures, fragmented computing power needs reliable allocation, autonomous agents require permissions and audits, and AI×biotech needs machine-readable and verifiable data layers. This is not a bet on a single model or token, but a competition for transaction execution, risk control, permissions, and workflow access as models, capital, and data become commoditized.
Historically, traditional Web3 incubators have mainly revolved around public chains, wallets, DEXs, and token issuance; traditional AI accelerators have focused on model applications and enterprise SaaS. EASY Residency merges the two: it channels capital flows through stablecoins, RWA, privacy computing, and on-chain settlement, while it channels intelligence and execution flows through computing power markets, trusted agents, and experimental data, attempting to bet on an infrastructure layer that is "jointly programmable for capital and intelligence."
This represents a reconstruction of the industrial chain. As stablecoins become the settlement layer, GPUs become financeable strategic resources, and agents begin to execute transactions and workflows on behalf of users, new value is no longer derived solely from application interfaces, but determined by who controls authorization, settlement, liquidity, data credibility, and risk bearing. The real threshold for project selection is not the narrative, but whether one can become the owner of a key constraint's infrastructure.
ABAB News · Laws of Cognition
New capabilities emerge, what is truly valuable is the new bottleneck.
AI can generate answers, infrastructure determines who can act.
Once capital is programmable, risks will also be automated.