YZi Labs announced the list of 24 early-stage companies for the fourth season of EASY Residency, with each company receiving an investment of $500,000, totaling $12 million for the season; the incubation period is 10 weeks, starting online, followed by a concentrated co-creation in Bhutan.

This season's investment focus is on next-generation global financial infrastructure, including stablecoin payments, on-chain foreign exchange, institutional market structure, privacy, credit, and AI-native execution. YZi Labs summarizes its direction as "agent-based finance" that is more programmable, localized, compliance-focused, and embedded in daily financial workflows.

The payment and cross-border finance direction includes Aile, D0, Facto, Kravata, Nara, Nxos, Spectrum, SurgePay, and ViFi. Aile builds an on-chain foreign exchange layer for regional non-USD stablecoins; D0 connects local payment methods in emerging markets with on-chain deposits; Nara provides programmable credit for cross-border payments; Nxos integrates fiat and stablecoin accounts for cross-border trade enterprises.

The on-chain market and liquidity direction includes Alloco, De¹, ElfomoFi, Liquorice, TradeNeutral, SmartXTerminal, and XStable. De¹ claims its real-time execution financial world model currently processes over $800 million daily, covering more than 200 institutions, over 1,000 liquidity sources, and 40 chains; XStable claims its on-chain gold and foreign exchange trading infrastructure has a daily trading volume exceeding $100 million, according to data disclosed by the project parties.

The compliance, privacy, and Agent infrastructure direction includes FinTax, Primus, Roostoo, xAPI, Xhunt AI, and ZeroDrift Security. Primus focuses on confidential computing infrastructure for institutional on-chain finance; Roostoo builds an AI trading Agent training and qualification screening layer; xAPI develops an API marketplace for AI Agents; ZeroDrift Security targets Agent security infrastructure in enterprise software.

In terms of market mechanisms, YZi Labs does not bet on a single public chain or stablecoin, but instead uses 24 standardized seed investments to cover multiple fee nodes including fund inflow and outflow, foreign exchange conversion, accounts, credit, market making, asset issuance, compliance, and Agent execution. Payment and foreign exchange infrastructure projects compete for enterprise transaction flows, market structure projects compete for liquidity and order flows, and compliance and security projects compete for institutional deployment budgets; teams lacking licensing partnerships, local payment access, or real settlement volumes will face higher elimination pressure.

Source: Public Information