Woofun AI reports that YZi Labs has finalized the cohort for the fourth season of its EASY Residency program, a flagship incubation initiative targeting early founders in Web3, AI, and biotech. The selection process identified 24 early-stage companies, each securing a $500,000 investment, to participate in a 10-week collaborative residency based in Bhutan. This season's strategic focus has shifted toward the next generation of global financial infrastructure, emphasizing stablecoin payments, on-chain foreign exchange, institutional-level market structures, privacy, credit, and AI-native execution. The chosen teams are tasked with developing solutions that integrate programmable finance into everyday processes, reflecting a vision for more localized and compliant 'agentic finance.'

The program structure begins with an online phase before convening founders in Bhutan for intensive collaborative work. Each of the 24 selected entities receives a uniform capital injection of $500,000, totaling $12 million in direct funding for this cohort. The 10-week duration is designed to accelerate product development and market integration. This model continues YZi Labs' commitment to supporting long-term founders through structured mentorship and peer collaboration. The geographic choice of Bhutan serves as a neutral, focused environment for builders to refine their technologies away from traditional financial hubs.

Strategic themes for this season span multiple layers of the financial stack. Key areas include stablecoin payments and cross-border settlements, on-chain foreign exchange, and new banking models. Institutional-level liquidity and market making infrastructure are also central, alongside digital asset privacy, compliance, and financial operations. AI agents, financial intelligence, and automated execution represent the technological frontier, while consumer and enterprise interfaces aim to bridge on-chain finance with user experience. AI-native security and creator infrastructure complete the thematic scope, ensuring that growth is supported by robust protection and economic opportunities for content creators.

Infrastructure developments focus on liquidity, FX, and settlements. One project utilizes an intent network where competitive solvers aggregate liquidity from foreign exchange brokers, DeFi pools, and issuer minting/redemption channels to create deep order books and enable on-chain atomic settlements. Another platform is building institutional-level on-chain ETFTs to cover real-world assets, market strategies, and thematic opportunities. Complex assets are being packaged into tokenized products, ranging from hedge fund strategies to tokenized pre-IPO offerings, serving both retail and institutional users.

Additionally, a solution is enabling on-chain trading platforms to accept local payment methods for deposits in emerging markets, recognizing that local payment integration will become core infrastructure for mass adoption.

Woofun AI data shows that market intelligence and trading infrastructure are being redefined by a world model for on-chain finance. This real-time market intelligence layer connects simulation with actual execution. According to the company, it currently handles over $800 million in daily transactions, serving more than 200 institutions, over 1,000 liquidity sources, and across more than 40 chains. Prop-AMM connects professional market makers, liquidity providers, and traders, bringing CEX-level pricing to the on-chain realm. Market makers can distribute liquidity to mainstream DEX aggregators and solvers, while LPs access delta-neutral market making strategies through public vaults and private liquidity networks. Users can consume directly from their profitable stablecoin balances without transferring or pre-loading funds.

Enterprise finance and compliance tools are critical for institutional adoption. An API connects various institutional balances with payment service providers, handling approval and settlement processes. FinTax is building crypto accounting, tax, and compliance infrastructure for enterprises, financial institutions, and governments, positioning operational standards as the foundation of the mature market. Another provider offers a single integrated entry point for banks, fintech firms, telecom companies, and enterprises, incorporating stablecoin accounts, deposits/withdrawals, custody, payment, and yield services. By managing regulatory requirements, bank relationships, liquidity, and compliance, this infrastructure helps partners launch stablecoin services more efficiently.

Capital efficiency and biotech integration highlight the diverse nature of the cohort. One project improves the capital efficiency of intent and RFQ market making by allowing market makers to borrow instantly from a shared pool upon winning a solver auction, eliminating the need to lock funds in multiple wallets. In the biotech sector, a platform integrates longevity diagnostics, continuous monitoring, and treatment by analyzing over 100 blood biomarkers, epigenetic tests, and data from connected devices to transform fragmented health data into dynamic records. Another fintech solution allows companies to withdraw and repay liquidity around the clock, pooling financing premiums into NaraUSD, a liquid, composable savings product designed for stablecoin-native credit stacks.

Institutional bridges and MEV solutions are being advanced by several startups. One platform brings professional trading strategies on-chain, connecting capital allocators with experienced traders; it has processed over $210 million in deposits, creating a structured bridge between institutional strategy design and broader market participation. Another transforms BNB Chain's leading MEV expertise into a DeFi execution layer, offering competitive quotes on BSC and serving as a leading solver for platforms like CoW Swap and OKX DEX Aggregator+. This reduces harmful MEV and returns extracted value to exchanges and the chain. A third solution serves businesses operating between traditional finance and crypto, integrating fiat and stablecoins into a single account to eliminate the need for separate bank accounts, OTC desks, and self-custody wallets.

AI agents, social trading, and remittances are being revolutionized by new technologies. A reinforcement learning agent factory trains thousands of quantitative models covering crypto perpetuals, stocks, commodities, and foreign exchange, with excellent agents selected through a real-time competition platform for deployment on DEXs and vaults. Social trading becomes verifiable and actionable through real position verification, AI-matched signals, and one-click execution, allowing valuable insights to be monetized. A 24/7 liquidation core routes crypto assets to native banking and card transfers, created by TradFi veterans with over 20 years of experience to avoid weekend bank closures and reduce settlement delays. For overseas Indians, a solution enables paying domestic bills directly via WhatsApp using stablecoin routes, converted to rupees at inter-market exchange rates with a target settlement time of less than two minutes.

The creator economy, security, and YZi's broader portfolio underscore the ecosystem's scale. An on-chain foreign exchange venue improves capital efficiency for emerging market currencies such as the Nigerian naira, Brazilian real, and Mexican peso, allowing payment companies to deposit USDC and complete conversions within seconds at oracle-anchored rates. A single key enables AI agents to discover, pay for, and call APIs across the network, fostering an autonomous creator market.

An agentic security layer embeds security engineers in clients' environments to turn expert judgment into code. YZi Labs manages an AUM of over $10 billion globally, with a portfolio of over 300 projects in 25 countries, including Trust Wallet, CoinMarketCap, Polygon, Injective, Ethena, SafePal Wallet, Better Payment Network, Aster, XAI, and SpaceX. More than 65 companies in its portfolio have participated in its incubation programs, reinforcing its 'impact first' investment philosophy.