Investing in Flipside Crypto: Incentivizing Developers to Enter Web3 and Build

We are thrilled to announce our investment into Flipside Crypto as part of its $50M Series A Round led by Republic Capital. We are participating alongside a handful of great investors including Collab+Currency, True Ventures, and Galaxy Digital.

An underserved market

At M13, we view web3 and crypto as a horizontal layer — much like mobile in 2010 — that started as an investment theme and soon permeated all verticals. The last 24 months have been exciting as we have witnessed an explosion of applications driven by DeFi and NFTs. But these markets are still nascent, and for a shift on the magnitude of mobile to occur, the underlying infrastructure needs to improve.

Given the immense opportunity in web3, there are astonishingly few developers in the space: 18,000 compared to ~4M total developers in the US. Flipside is changing this by incentivizing developers to participate in web3 through bounties.

How it works

Protocols post bounties - from simple queries to detailed dashboards - and Flipside users complete them and earn payment in the native token of the protocol. As an example, a user analyzing liquidity provider Aave can receive a reward in $AAVE for completing and posting bounties. Flipside’s bounty program provides users a seamless way to explore new protocols and earn the native currency.

Protocols love this too as Flipside is a customer acquisition channel for them. They all want (need!) additional talent, and protocols can rely on Flipside to provide a channel for decentralized analytics. Flipside has amassed an impressive customer base: partners include Terra, Solana, Flow, Algorand, Thorchain, Osmosis, and more.

Protocols and their foundations fund these bounties through grants and delegations to Flipside’s nodes, and they are incentivized to fund them as Flipside drives more talent and analytics to their networks. This is proving to be a high quality source of talent for protocols. On average, 90% of new bounty hunters are experimenting with a protocol for the first time. Flipside’s retention averages are north of 80%, and more importantly developers are staying in these ecosystems: bounty hunters are keeping over 80% of their rewards staked in the native token of the protocol that they’re working on, which continues to enhance protocol health.

The number of monthly bounties submitted is rapidly growing:

Submitted Bounties (different colors denote unique protocols)
Source: Flipside Crypto

Flipside is also a creator of MetricsDAO, a DAO that leverages Flipside’s infrastructure to create the future of crypto analytics. As on-chain activity grows, we look forward to the subsequent DAOs that will emerge and leverage Flipside’s tooling. We are in the early innings!

To Dave, Jim, Eric and the entire Flipside Crypto team: thank you for partnering with us, and we are excited to be on this journey together. Welcome to the M13 family!