Request for Startups

Introduction

Lit is decentralizing public key cryptography and is a network that provides programmatic access to a distributed encryption and cryptographic signing. For a web2 analogy, you can think of Lit as a fault-tolerant and distributed serverless lambda function service plus key management system, without a centralized key holder.

The page below outlines some of the innovations that Lit enables and that we would love to see built.  If you’re working on any of these concepts already, please get in touch. However, we know that there are so many other potential uses for Lit which are not on this list, so if you have another idea, please say hi!

DeFi Automation and Signing Vaults
Programmable Money + Programmable Signing

The decentralized nature of decentralized finance means that DeFi users are required to sign messages from their wallet in order to interact with the DeFi smart contracts. In other words, there’s a  ‘human in the loop’. With Lit’s programmatic signing, a whole class of structured DeFi products, like dollar cost averaging and liquidity loss prevention could be rules based.

Startups in this category can enable users to have the type of automation in decentralized finance that they are currently getting with centralized exchanges and in traditional finance.

Private / Self Sovereign Web3 Social Graph
Make Everyone’s ‘Friends and Followers’ Their Own Personal Digital Property

The social graph may be the world's most important and valuable data asset. With Lit’s client side encryption method of access control and key provisioning, a new kind of social graph can be built where each user can selectively disclose who can see their friends and followers. This system could be built with decentralized web nodes (AT Protocol) or on the open web (Ceramic).

Startups in this category can impact the next generation of social networking, which has wide reaching implications.

1 to 1 Backed BTC on EVM + Cosmos Chains
Bring Bitcoin to Smart Contract Chains

The decentralized and programmable key provided by Lit can sign transactions across a number of blockchains, including Bitcoin, EVM chains, and Cosmos chains. This capacity can be leveraged to bring backed BTC into ecosystems that have robust DeFi applications.

Startups in this category can create more interoperability between ecosystems.

Cryptographic Notary
Virtualized Signing Keys for Enterprises, Media, IOT, and Consortiums

The Programmable Key Pair (“PKP”) provided by Lit can function as a signer across a variety of enterprise use-cases by acting as an immutable, programable, virtualized signing key in an enclave. Some examples include enabling IOT devices to create cryptographically secure timestamps as well as doing the same thing for media publishers.

Startups in this category can be broad reaching and help to ensure data integrity and combat deep fakes and also provide significant enterprise value, in a ‘zero trust’ information security context.

MEV Protection
Using Threshold Encryption to Eliminate MEV on L2s

Maximal Miner Extractable Value (MEV) refers to the maximum amount of monetary value that can be extracted by block producers by re-ordering, front-running, or excluding transactions in a block. Lit’s threshold cryptography network can be utilized to create an encrypted mempool solution whereby transactions get encrypted and submitted privately, only getting decrypted after execution. In this architecture, a DKG process is performed by the Lit nodes to facilitate the provisioning of encryption and decryption keys.

Startups in this category can help support more equitable consumer markets and will contribute to censorship resistance on public blockchain networks.

Getting Started

If you’re working on a startup that’s in one of these categories, considering applying for a grant and if you’d like to get in touch to discuss your project, please use this form or jump into discord. If you need more inspiration, check out Lit's ecosystem proposal requests.

Once you’ve created a proof of concept and / or demonstrated demand for what you’re building, the team at Lit would be excited to put you in touch with some of our capital partners who fund pre-seed startups, including 1kx, 6th Man Ventures, a_capital, CMT Digital, Eniac Ventures, Figment Capital, gumi Cryptos Capital, LongHash Ventures, Protocol Labs, Sfermion, Valhalla Ventures, and Village Global.

We're looking forward to building web3 together!