YZi Labs has selected 24 early-stage teams for Season 4 of its EASY Residency program, assigning $500,000 to each project as it concentrates its latest cohort on global payments, on-chain markets and “agentic finance.” The roster spans Web3, artificial intelligence and biotech, but the crypto-facing companies offer a more immediate view of the products being built around tokenized strategies, market-making infrastructure, digital-dollar liquidity and automated trading tools.
Nine of the selected teams currently offer some form of public access, ranging from active vault deposits and liquidity pools to creator campaigns, browser extensions and waitlists. Those entry points vary sharply in maturity. Some products are already accepting capital or running incentive programs, while others remain gated behind invite codes or have yet to release their core application.
The residency funding places a group of specialist financial-technology teams under one umbrella rather than backing another base blockchain network. Several companies are building tools intended to sit above existing chains: vaults that package trading strategies, pools for professional market makers, infrastructure for verifiable private data, and digital-dollar products for payment firms.
Neutral Trade runs deposit campaign for strategy vaults
Neutral Trade is among the most developed products in the group. The project operates an on-chain marketplace for quantitative trading strategies, where systematic approaches are packaged into vault-style products that users can deposit into.
Neutral Trade says it has processed more than $210 million in deposits to date. Its public Autopilot Deposit campaign advertises an 11.5% deposit APY and a two-times multiplier on NT Points. The project lists total value locked in its Neutral Autopilot product at $3.78 million.
The model gives users exposure to a strategy rather than requiring them to place and manage each trade themselves. That can make quantitative products easier to access, but depositors remain exposed to the strategy’s execution, smart-contract design and underlying market risks. A published yield or points multiplier does not establish the durability of returns.
Primus ties creator rewards to cryptography activity
Primus, which is building cryptographic infrastructure for institutional on-chain finance, launched its Primus Warm Up content activity on Aug. 25 with an $8,000 reward pool. The campaign ranks participants using factors including content quality, social engagement, verification activity and referral traffic.
The top two creators are scheduled to receive $1,500 each, while third through fifth place receive $1,000 each. Participants ranked sixth through 10th are allocated $400 each.
Primus focuses on privacy, data-authenticity verification and compliance-oriented financial operations. Its technical stack includes zkTLS, which can help prove information from external web sources without broadly exposing the underlying data, and zkFHE, a form of cryptography intended to support operations on encrypted information.
On Feb. 21, 2025, Primus announced a combined pre-seed and seed financing round of $6.5 million. Its inclusion in the YZi Labs program connects that infrastructure work to a cohort increasingly focused on bringing data, compliance processes and more complex financial activity on-chain.
Waitlists and gated products dominate the earlier-stage teams
Roostoo has opened a waitlist for early access to its AI trading-agent training and screening platform. The product emerged from university cryptocurrency trading simulations and uses live market data and competitions to assess strategies side by side. Its public materials frame the product around evaluating agents before they are deployed in market settings.
SmartX is earlier in its public rollout. The project previously operated a USDC-and-points trading campaign, but that program has ended and the next points round has not been announced. SmartX launched a new website on Aug. 25, while its app is marked “Coming soon” and currently requires an invite code. The project has indicated a launch is planned for the following month.
Alloco is developing an on-chain ETF issuance platform intended to package portfolios and strategies into tokenized ETFT products that can be purchased with USDC. Its GAIN and ETFT offerings remain labelled “Coming Soon.” Community communications point prospective users toward whitelist registration for early access rather than a live public product.
These projects illustrate the difference between access and availability. A waitlist, campaign or gated application can offer a way to follow development closely, but it does not provide the same level of product history, liquidity or risk information as a deployed market with sustained usage.
Digital dollars and market making feature prominently
Nara is building a PayFi-focused digital-dollar protocol aimed at providing short-term, around-the-clock liquidity to payment companies. The protocol directs financing premiums into NaraUSD, described as a yield-bearing, USD-denominated on-chain asset.
Nara’s website lists total value locked near $10 million and shows functions for swapping NaraUSD, staking it, holding NaraUSD+ and providing liquidity to a NaraUSD/USDC pool. A PayFi product is scheduled for release in September. The design targets a practical constraint for payment businesses: capital tied up during settlement and financing cycles. If deployed as described, the protocol would connect on-chain dollar liquidity with payment-company funding demand.
Market-making infrastructure is also represented by ElfomoFi and Liquorice. ElfomoFi operates an EVM-focused on-chain market-making protocol based on a Hybrid Prop-AMM model, with users able to access curated Prop-AMM vaults through its website. The product does not display a public points system.
Liquorice is targeting professional market makers through a shared liquidity pool designed to reduce the capital that participants need to pre-fund across separate wallets during quote competition and settlement. Its app currently allows deposits through a “Supply” function, and it likewise does not show a live points program.
Participation is not uniform across the cohort
XHunt offers creator-influence analytics for activity on X and has released a Chrome extension that can be used after connecting an account. It does not list a live points system. Along with the waitlist-only and invite-only products in the cohort, XHunt shows that public participation in Season 4 is not limited to supplying assets or chasing yield.
The $500,000 allocation to each of 24 teams totals $12 million across the Season 4 intake, based on YZi Labs’ announced roster. The chosen companies suggest the program is placing particular weight on applications that can automate financial workflows or make on-chain markets more usable for specialized participants.
For users evaluating these products, the immediate opportunities are uneven: Neutral Trade, Nara, ElfomoFi and Liquorice have visible deposit or liquidity functions, while Primus is running a defined creator program. Roostoo, SmartX and Alloco are primarily offering early-access routes. The difference matters because a public campaign, a waitlist and a live financial protocol involve very different levels of capital commitment and operational risk.
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