Equilibrium: Building and Funding Core Infrastructure For The Decentralized Web

Since 2018, Equilibrium Labs has focused on solving the hardest engineering problems around security, privacy, and scaling of blockchain-based systems. With partners such as Starkware, Aleo, and zkSync, we’ve helped build foundations for the decentralized web.

In 2024, we launched Equilibrium Ventures and its first fund, which backs ambitious founders in the early stages.

Today, we’re taking the next step in our journey by combining Labs (our R&D studio) and Ventures (our early-stage venture fund) under one unified brand, Equilibrium. This enables us to provide more comprehensive support to early-stage builders (“code and capital”) and to double down on our core mission of helping build the decentralized web.

Interested? Keep reading - and don’t hesitate to reach out!

Why Are We Here?

At Equilibrium, we identify three mega-trends shaping the coming decades. These trends introduce unique challenges for humanity, and will require innovation and deep technical expertise to solve:

1. Verifiability

With the rapid proliferation of AI, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Internet as we know it today won’t last much longer. How do we verify what is human-generated (“real”) versus AI-generated (“fake”)? We are currently at a pivotal point where our intuition is no longer sufficient to tell the two apart, and this issue will only intensify as generative AI models become more sophisticated.

Furthermore, as the world becomes more AI-infused, interactions will shift from human-to-human to both AI-to-AI and AI-to-human. How can AI agents prove their identity and establish enough mutual trust to interact and initiate a transaction? Similarly, how can we ensure the correct model was used for a particular inference?

The challenge of verifiability affects everything from content creation (image, text, audio, video, etc.) to commerce and even personal connections (for example, through online dating).

2. Sovereignty

An increasing amount of our lives are spent and stored online, but the underlying infrastructure remains fragile. A select few companies control a significant share of our (digital) lives, posing a growing threat to national and individual sovereignty. Decentralized infrastructure provides a more robust foundation that can better withstand political pressure and nation-state attacks.

In addition, the lack of privacy in digital interactions undermines individual freedom and, taken to its extreme, the core tenets of democracy. Due to strong economic incentives, our data is being harvested and exploited at an unprecedented scale. Web2 business models thrive on leveraging personal data for advertising, while security narratives like chat control in the EU add political pressure against digital privacy. To change the status quo, new forms of governance, collaboration, and commercial models are needed.

3. Coordination

The Internet revolutionized communication and made it natively global, yet our ability to build trust and long-term commitments still relies heavily on analog legal frameworks bound by national borders. Blockchains enable digital commitments, which allow application developers to build on solid foundations rather than APIs where access can be restricted at any time. One of the biggest second-order effects of digital commitments is the interoperability of software.

Today we also face several large-scale global challenges, such as climate change and pollution, that demand cross-border coordination. However, the jurisdiction-based coordination and governance structures limit our ability to collaborate effectively on issues that transcend individual nations. Without proper tools, solving these global commons remains an open challenge.

The Solution: Decentralized Systems, Modern Cryptography, and Blockchains

We believe blockchains, decentralized systems, and modern cryptographic techniques (ZKP, MPC, FHE, TEEs, and beyond) are uniquely positioned to help us solve the abovementioned problems. Combined, these technologies introduce digital commitments as native features of the web, making digital interactions predictable and verifiable without intermediaries.

This unlocks a new era of coordination at internet speed, free of national and geographic constraints. Decentralizing the core infrastructure that underpins our digital lives also increases its resilience against various attack vectors.

However, despite their potential, blockchains and decentralized systems have yet to deliver on their promises. While significant progress has been made, the underlying infrastructure still needs to improve by orders of magnitude. In addition, novel technological primitives must be invented, prototyped, and scaled in the coming decades.

This is where Equilibrium comes in.

Our Mission: Building the Future Together

At Equilibrium, we aim to become the Schelling point for the world’s brightest technical minds building these primitives. We strive to support them with top-tier R&D and engineering capabilities, a stimulating working environment, a broad network of mentors, and the funding needed to bring ambitious ideas to life.

We partner with leading builders in the space through three main ways:

R&D and Engineering: Over the past six years, we’ve gained deep expertise in blockchain infrastructure and distributed systems across a wide range of projects. Our approach emphasizes:
- Partnering with ambitious teams to tackle complex engineering challenges
- Rapid experimentation and short feedback cycles to accelerate progress
- Open-sourcing our work to foster community-driven innovation
Funding: Through Equilibrium Ventures, we invest in ambitious founders and early-stage companies (pre-seed and seed). Post-funding, we continue to collaborate closely by providing engineering and strategic support to teams to increase their chances of success.
Pre-Founders: Great ideas don’t grow on trees, but exceptional talent combined with our experience helps identify market gaps and opportunities. As an Entrepreneur In Residence, you’ll gain access to:
- Our internal expertise and external network
- Close guidance with ideation, prototyping, and scaling
- Support with fundraising, corporate setup, and the rest of your entrepreneurial journey

In addition to these three forms of collaboration, we believe in fostering a broader ecosystem of contributors. From organizing hacker houses to exploring new ways of supporting builders, our vision for Equilibrium is more than a company—it’s a thriving open-source community for decentralized innovation.