New York-based Donut Labs has raised $7 million in a pre-seed funding spherical to construct what it claims is the world’s first “agentic” crypto browser — a instrument designed to assist customers work together with blockchain-based purposes utilizing synthetic intelligence.
The spherical was led by Sequoia, Bitkraft and HackVC, with participation from angel buyers together with Solana and different ecosystem leaders, akin to Matrix Companions, Sky9 Ventures, Makers Fund and SonicSVM.
The $7 million will help the event of Donut, an executable crypto browser powered by synthetic intelligence brokers, with a local cryptocurrency pockets and decentralized alternate integration, decentralized community entry and onchain execution.
In contrast to conventional internet browsers, Donut’s AI algorithms perceive web page context and person intent, serving to it autonomously execute blockchain-based operations.
“The standard browser hasn’t modified for greater than 30 years. We’re re-architecting every part,” mentioned Donut founder and CEO Chris Zhu. “We’re reconstructing the entrance finish of the web to be hyper-financialized for AI brokers.”
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Donut’s customers will achieve entry to an array of decentralized instruments and crypto companies underneath a single agentic interface, which might make digital asset transactions safer.
“Architecturally remoted signing environments and AI-powered danger screening safe each transaction whereas optimizing execution for pace and price,” mentioned Zhu, including that “AI interprets opaque calldata into plain English and assigns security grades.”
Donut’s AI brokers can commerce or swap tokens, place bets, or earn passive yield on digital property.
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Agentic browsers might reshape web in subsequent decade
Whereas Donut’s earliest adopters will doubtless be crypto merchants, builders or decentralized finance (DeFi) customers, agentic browsers might explode into the mainstream in the course of the subsequent decade.
Inside the subsequent 5 years, Ethereum layer-2 (L2) networks will use agentic browsers to chop settlement prices. Mainstream browsers can even combine agentic capabilities or construct interoperability with purpose-built agentic browsers as AI turns into cheaper, in keeping with Zhu.
Nonetheless, probably the most important adoption will come inside the subsequent decade when onchain and offchain environments shall be utterly merged for web customers, Zhu mentioned, including:
“Agentic browsers are poised to develop into the default entry level — very similar to smartphones changed characteristic telephones.”
In the long run, Donut goals to help funds, gaming, content material creation and social interplay, all inside a single crypto-native browser. The corporate additionally plans to leverage developments in decentralized identification and confidential computing to show the browser into a private “crypto CFO” for retail customers.
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