YZi Labs Launches EASY Residency Season 3 Incubation Cohort
YZi Labs officially announced all graduating founding teams of EASY Residency Season 3 after the Demo Day at the Computer History Museum in California, focusing on the reconstruction of on-chain financial market structures and AI as a first-class citizen.
This season's cohort covers themes such as AI agent identity payments, on-chain verifiable reasoning, RWA liquidity, prediction and skill markets, privacy compliance, and programmatic infrastructure. Multiple teams have already landed in ecosystems like BNB Chain and Base.
In terms of market mechanisms, institutions and incubation capital are accelerating their allocation towards cross-projects in on-chain finance + AI agents, with funding shifting from purely narrative tokens to verifiable infrastructure and actual adoption protocols. This cohort drives capital concentration towards the YZi Labs ecosystem and teams like Bank of AI, Cournot, and LunarBase, putting pressure on traditional DeFi infrastructure projects.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
YZi Labs has previously incubated over 65 companies, including Trust Wallet, Polygon, Injective, and Ethena. This Season 3 focuses on "AI as a first-class actor on-chain," continuing its path from Web3 infrastructure to the integration of AI and financial market structures, with funds managing over $10 billion continuously investing resources into early high-conviction founders.
In terms of capital pathways, YZi Labs provides mentorship, community, and follow-up investments through EASY Residency, shifting resources from single-chain DeFi to AI agent identities, unified margin layers, and privacy pools as composable infrastructure. The motivation is to capture the new market structure dividends as AI agents become the main trading entities on-chain, providing the next generation of liquidity and execution layers for ecosystems like BNB Chain.
Similar cases include a16z crypto's early incubation of Paradigm-style trading infrastructure and other incubators transitioning to agentic finance in 2024-2025. The on-chain financial industry is currently undergoing a transformation from liquidity + narrative dominance to AI verifiable intelligence + new asset class control, with YZi Labs Season 3 cohort occupying multiple key niche tracks.
Essentially, this represents a restructuring of the industry chain: the human-centered trading structure of traditional DeFi is being replaced by AI agent-native infrastructure. The fundamental mechanism is that AI agents require new primitives such as identity, payments, verifiable reasoning, unified margin, and privacy compliance. Only by making these layers into composable protocols can AI transition from an external tool to a core on-chain executor, achieving a structural shift from human-driven DeFi to agentic financial markets.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
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