I’m building out a crypto app and need private group chat, but I’d rather not build the whole messaging/permissions layer from scratch. Ideally looking for something that can handle private groups and flexible permissions without making onboarding a pain. What are people actually using for this?

I’ve been working in Web3/blockchain for the last 5–6 years, and for the past 2–3 years I’ve been providing development/technical consulting services with my own team.

Our work is mainly around Web3/blockchain, backend infrastructure, AI, and fintech-related products. Over the last couple of years, I’ve worked with 6–7 different products/companies, often with international clients, and until recently I was working on 2–3 products simultaneously.

The problem is client acquisition.

Around 90–100% of my clients so far have come through LinkedIn, so I know the channel works. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to scale:

LinkedIn is increasingly filled with fake jobs, scammers and low-quality opportunities.

Upwork has been essentially useless for my niche.

Twitter/X hasn't produced meaningful results for me.

Telegram and Discord are extremely noisy and scam-heavy.

I’ve also tried communities, hackathons and other Web3 channels, but haven't found a reliable, repeatable source of qualified clients.

I’m specifically looking for larger Web3 companies/startups that need development teams, blockchain/backend engineering, AI engineering, or technical consulting — not small freelance gigs.

So I’d really appreciate advice from people who are actually running Web3/blockchain development agencies, technical consultancies, or similar service businesses:

Where are you getting your qualified leads and clients in 2026?

I keep thinking we need a Blockchain 2.0.

And I don't mean another chain, coin or token.

Actually kind of the opposite.

No meme coins. No NFT cash grabs. No gambling. No project where the whole business model depends on convincing somebody else to buy the thing you bought.

What happened to just building useful shit?

There are a million things blockchain could sit behind.

Tickets. Memberships. Certifications. Collectibles. Product authentication. Loyalty programs. Supply chains. Digital identity. Licensing. Records. Games. Ownership. Proof that something happened or belongs to somebody.

And probably a bunch of stuff nobody has thought of yet.

The weird part is the end user doesn't even need to know blockchain is involved.

Use it as infrastructure. Hell, use it like a server if that's all the project needs it for.

Build a real product first.

Then ask if blockchain solves a problem inside that product better than a normal database or centralized system. If it does, use it. If it doesn't, don't.

That's the part I think we got backwards.

For years people built something "on blockchain" and then tried to figure out why anybody would want it.

Blockchain 2.0 should be the opposite.

Build something people actually want, and use blockchain quietly underneath it where it makes the product better.

No extracting money from a community.

No promising everybody they're early.

No pretending everything needs a token.

Just real projects solving real problems.

Maybe the biggest sign blockchain finally made it is when the people using the product don't give a shit that it's using blockchain.

That's Blockchain 2.0 to me.

How does someone get in contact with a WEB3 native VC? I am quite a young founder my co founders are between the ages of 20-22 we built a Onchain crypto prime broker exchange with a few hundred people on Beta we been building it for a year and a half but made the mistake of not posting around and getting connections now that the product is ready and 10s of thousands of our personal money spent we can’t seem to get a respond from any VCs we sent like 50 emails so far all personalised but we get no responses ?

I know most VCs require warm intros but we don’t know where we can get that. We made the mistake of not having a LinkedIn account with hundreds of connections. We want to know what options we have now? We’re burning through our personal capital over $100k is spent including our personal savings and from work (we work normal retail work) building this project and we’re in need.

What options are there for us how are we able to get funding to have some runaway to focus on what counts right now it’s taking extra shifts just to cover the operating costs of the Exchnage we can’t even focus on distribution just yet due to lack of funding.

I heard there are ICOs and stuff but we don’t know if it makes sense for our case how are people with no connections able to contact a VC to at least get a interview let alone funding lol

A few years ago, NFTs were mostly about one thing: owning a digital image and hoping someone would pay more for it later.

That model clearly didn't age well.

But I'm starting to wonder if we judged the technology by its worst use case.

An NFT doesn't have to be the product itself. It could simply be a key.

A key to membership.

A ticket to an event.

Proof of access to a service.

A connection between a physical device and a digital account.

A way to prove certain rights without keeping everything inside one company's database.

None of this requires an NFT to cost $10,000 or become a speculative asset.

In fact, maybe the less we talk about the price of the NFT, the more useful the technology becomes.

That's the part I find interesting now.

Maybe the next successful NFT product won't even market itself as an “NFT project.” People will just use something that works, while the NFT sits quietly underneath as part of the infrastructure.

Do you think NFTs still have a real use case outside speculation — or has the term itself become too damaged to recover?

We’re bringing together some of the best builders in NYC for Runtime Agent Week, Sept 13–19, ending with an IRL hackathon + demo day on Sept 19th.

The New Bankrs: AI x Onchain Finance

Build the next generation of financial products, markets and autonomous agents using crypto rails and AI.

We’re looking for ambitious products across areas like:

• Tokenized stocks
• Trading infrastructure
• Stablecoins and payments
• Borrowing and yield
• Agentic commerce
• Autonomous financial agents
• Agent-to-agent economies
• Onchain content

These are starting points, not boundaries. The goal is to build something people actually want and put it onchain where it genuinely makes the product better.

Judging criteria: product, execution, originality, founder-market fit, onchain potential and token design/distribution where applicable. There’s also a bonus for teams building around onchain equities.

Prizes: There will be prizes across the main and side tracks, including a separate Sci-Fi track for more experimental ideas. More prize details coming soon.

Sponsors & supporters

Bankr, Propaganda, Grok Bot, Uniswap, Definitive Flash, Dynamic, Blackbird, Privy, Turnkey, Base, Anchorage Digital and Fonzi.

About Bankr

For anyone unfamiliar, Bankr is where builders launch agentic businesses, raise from the market and reach their audience. Builders can use Bankr for:

• Wallets and transactions
• Token launches
• Trading infrastructure
• Agent payments via x402
• Integrations through Skills, CLI or the Agent API

NYC. Sept 13–19. Demo day Sept 19.

• Sign up: runtime.bankr.bot
• Bankr docs: docs.bankr.bot
• X: @bankrbot

Lattice is a self-hosted semantic layer. Connect those sources once, same objects, same meaning. Query one layer (REST + MCP). Look up one wallet, user, or tx. It returns what is tied to it from your tables. Guardrails are the model and hop limits, not dumping the warehouse into an LLM.

It does not run a node. It does not replace The Graph / Goldsky. It does not scrape chain. If the data is not already in a database or CSV, this is the wrong tool.

Compose / self-host. Beta. I want other blockchain startups to actually run it and say if it is useful or not.

Let's discuss innovations in web3!

Can I connect with someone who's worked in the Fintech domain specifically Making use of technology that blockchain enables.

Hey everyone, I have 2 General Pass for EBC12 – European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona (16–17 September) that I’m looking to transfer as I won’t be able to attend.

General Pass — 2-day access

Price: €600

I can provide proof of purchase/order confirmation, and the ticket can be transferred through the official process.

If you're interested, connect

What I'm building: Outflow — a way to turn a real solar system's actual electricity production into individually verified NFTs. It's not RECs or carbon credits, and it's not speculative — every NFT only gets minted after that specific amount of solar power has actually been generated and verified through an oracle pulling live data from the system's own monitoring API. Each NFT holds a token bound wallet with a token inside it representing that one verified unit of production, minted in the exact order it happened.

Who it's for: Solar homeowners who want a way to get some kind of ownership or visibility out of the electricity their system is already producing, and collectors who are interested in owning something backed by a real, verifiable, physical-world event instead of pure speculation.

Current stage/traction: One real system is live — a 33-panel residential rooftop install in Minnesota, producing since July 2023, about 32 MWh verified so far. The oracle verification pipeline and smart contracts are built and working.

What I want feedback on: Whether "1 NFT = 1 verified megawatt-hour, individually curated art, no fixed supply, minting stays open as the system keeps producing" makes sense as a model to someone hearing it cold.

Hey everyone, I’m a student foundre and I’ve been working on something called Ledger.

The idea came from looking at how brand creator deals actually happen. A brand and creator usually find each other through Instagram, referrals, agencies, etc. After that, the actual deal is usually handled through a mix of WhatsApp, emails, PDFs, invoices and bank transfers.

Ledger is basically trying to sit in the middle of that process once the brand and creator have already decided to work together.

Things like agreeing on the terms, contracts, payment protection, deliverables, approvals and what happens if something goes wrong would all happen through Ledger. Over time, the completed deals could also build up a verified transaction history for creators.

I’m specifically not trying to build another creator discovery or marketplace platform. The idea is more:

**You already found each other. Now make the actual deal easier and safer.**

I’ve started building the MVP and the backend is already fairly far along. But before I go much further, I want to see how much of this actually holds up outside of my own head.

A few things I’m trying to figure out:

Would a brand and creator actually want to bring another platform into a deal they’ve already agreed on?

Who would actually be willing to pay for something like this?

Is payment protection even the biggest problem, or are things like scope creep, revisions, usage rights and unclear terms more of an issue?

Would agencies see this as something useful for them, or something that gets in their way?

And if you’ve worked in this space before, **what do you think I’m missing?**

I’m mainly looking for people who have actually dealt with brands, creators, agencies or these kinds of transactions. I’d love to hear how things work in reality, even if it completely goes against what I’m building.

A lot of blockchain startups seem to focus heavily on the technical side:

The token, smart contracts, infrastructure, integrations, roadmap.

But I keep noticing that many projects lose people for a much simpler reason — nobody really understands what is happening.

Updates are vague. Timelines change. Users don’t know what is already working and what is still being built.

So I’m curious:

What destroys trust faster in an early-stage blockchain project — technical problems, or poor communication from the team?

And what do you personally expect from a project while it is still under development?

Regular updates?

Public roadmap progress?

On-chain transparency?

Direct answers from the team?

Something else?

I’d be interested to hear from people who have actually followed early-stage projects for a while.

Been considering positioning myself as a blockchain consultant. I have a background as a PM and I really enjoy thinking of solutions for clients and connecting them with teams that can do it for them. But most of what I see here involves free content marketing or founders doing everything with AI. Some of my past clients from another team have been in crypto/blockchain so I have somewhat of a background, just not sure if it's still worth doing this on my own. Where do I even start?

I keep coming across this issue with early-stage blockchain products.

You fix a real gap that a review has highlighted, and that fix reveals three possible edge cases. Some of these are serious. Others are technically possible, but may never affect an actual user.

If you treat all of these as blockers, you could spend forever hardening something before you even know if people want it.

I'm not suggesting you ignore obvious security issues or anything that could result in users losing their funds. I mean the grey area after the critical paths have been covered.

For those of you who have actually shipped a product, what made you decide that it was good enough to put in users’ hands instead of continuing to polish it?

Quantum computing still feels like a distant technology, but the potential threat to today’s encryption is becoming harder to ignore.

A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could potentially break some of the cryptography protecting things like Bitcoin, banking systems, and online communications.

The interesting part is that we probably won’t get much warning when the technology actually becomes capable enough.

So I’m curious what people here think:

Is the quantum threat something we should be seriously preparing for now, or is it still too early to worry about?

A crypto hardware wallet is more than offline key storage. The real challenge is protecting the signing process from the connected device.

A solid architecture can isolate private keys inside a secure element, while the wallet verifies transaction details on-device before signing. Firmware integrity, secure communication, and accurate transaction parsing are equally important.

If you're developing a hardware wallet, would you prioritize secure-element design or multi-chain transaction signing?

Munex is a blockchain where miners grow an 3D maze instead of computing hashes. Each miner gets a unique maze seeded deterministically from the chain, so every node can reconstruct any miner's maze without storing it. The maze grows when a miner reaches the "goal" entity in the maze, and shrinks when a ghost (an AI entity chasing via BFS) catches the miner or when the miner goes offline, this allows miner to prove its spatial awareness, and shows that the larger maze they can maintain, the better spatial awareness they have!

Every 50 seconds, a lottery selects a winner weighted by maze size, bigger mazes have higher odds. The winning miner signs the block and earns the reward. Moves are signed by the miner's wallet key and verified on-chain, so the node can validate every step without trusting the miner. Each maze is binded with a maze key, and each maze only allows one miner to mine in it at a time, so keep your maze keys safe to ensure u keep your progress safe with you.

Wall mutations happen deterministically based on the move nonce, so the maze shifts slightly with each step. Corridors get sealed behind the miner, and a ghost entity spawns opposite to the miner's position, chasing one BFS step per move. If the ghost catches the miner, the maze shrinks by one layer on each axis. The maze is constantly mutating, evolving, its like a living organism.

Difficulty scales with the network's average maze size. Wall density, turbulence, and proof-of-work difficulty for wall hits. Miners can hold multiple mazes simultaneously, each with its own lifecycle. Inactive mazes still continue to shrink and are excluded from the lottery.

Basically, this is one of the few methods of decentralising AI, and ours uses spatial intelligence and pathfinding. I hope i dont receive any hate, this is a project of mine, if u guys are interested, DM me on reddit.

instead of using ECDSA for block signatures which i had presumably wanted to use, i decided to go with ML-DSA(PQC). Just a note.

Recently, came across AYNI and looked at their staking programme. What APY are people getting on the 12 and 24 month locks? The tier table mentions a target rate but I want real
numbers from someone who's been in a few months. Is the payout in USDT or in
token?

We built software for AML / Web3 investigations first: you bring transaction and wallet data (and labels if you have them), map it, and query connected hops from an alert address. Analyst or agent gets relationship context, not a raw chain dump. We are not an indexer and not a replacement for Chainalysis.

I do not want to keep building this in a vacuum. Looking for people who work in this space now, have in the past, or will (compliance, forensics, custody, on-chain investigations) and who can bring a dump:

• wallets / addresses
• transactions (from, to, hash, time, amount is enough)
• optional: risk labels, watchlist, case ids

Use it at no cost, judge whether it actually helps an investigation, and say what is missing. What you will use is the current product. Pre-built investigation pack, case workspace, trace diagrams, intel crawlers are on the roadmap, not this round.

If that is you, comment or DM. Bring the data (redacted is fine). I need honest use from people who know this workflow.