The Quantum Frontier – September Newsletter

Hey folks,

Welcome back to Quantum Leap Labs, your monthly look at what actually matters in Web3: where the money’s moving, what the frontier teams are building, and how the Internet Computer is positioning itself as one of the most critical layers in crypto.

August was no slow month. VC checks topped $1.8B and digital asset treasuries overtook equity deals. AI funding showed no signs of cooling, and ICP shipped milestones that pushed it further into AI and Bitcoin DeFi. Add in new platforms like Matcha and Liquidium’s bridgeless lending, and the ecosystem is evolving faster than most expected.

If you want to cut through the noise, track the signals, and stay ahead of the curve, this is your 8–10 minute alpha window. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

1. VC Trends: Billion-dollar drumbeat and the rise of Digital Asset Treasuries (2–3 minutes)
2. AI x Crypto: Why investors keep pouring money despite bubble warnings (2 minutes)
3. ICP Builders Update: Ignition, Internet Identity 2.0, Matcha launch, bridgeless lending (3 minutes)
4. Performance Check: ICP tops TPS charts and decentralization rankings (2 minutes)
5. Ecosystem Rollouts: Caffeine phases and Encode London’s dual-track hackathon (2 minutes)
6. Web3 Wisdom: No-code AI and the new wave of decentralized apps (1 minute)

VC Trends: August’s Billion Dollar Drumbeat

Money got loud this time Sixty five crypto firms raised 1.8B in August. Year to date funding is near 15B. That already beats all of 2024 by four billion.

Bullish owned the headline with a 1.1B NYSE IPO at a 5.4B valuation. Compliance and market structure still command attention. Mid market deals showed the pattern.

IVIX pulled 60M for AI crime detection. 1Kosmos raised 57M for identity verification. Infrastructure that touches finance and security is in favor.

It was the kind of month that reminds you: this market may look quiet on price charts, but beneath the surface, the builders and backers are busy.

Is AI the New Darling of Crypto Investors?

Well the tally says yes for now!

AI focused crypto raised 516M from January through August. That is already above the whole of last year. Capital came from names like Pantera Sequoia and Binance Labs. Coinbase shipped x402 so agents can pay each other.

Now for the reality check. People at MIT found that ninety five percent of AI pilots have not produced any good revenue. Sam Altman warned that a bubble can form and even so the bet persists and new asset classes appear. Datasets, fine tuned models, autonomous agents and render style networks try to open GPU supply. Investors know the risk and still choose an early position.

AI in crypto right now feels like a good jazz show, a bit messy, a bit improvisational, not always pretty, but every once in a while you catch a riff that could change the whole tune.

Would you bet on AI crime detection or decentralized identity? Let us know.

Digital Asset Treasuries Overtook Traditional VC With the Blink of An Eye

On the other hand the shift in the investment class grid is impossible to miss.

• Digital Asset Treasuries raised more than $15B this year through August 21
• Venture equity for crypto hovered closer to $6–8B.
• Public companies are raising capital just to buy and hold tokens on their balance sheet.

Strategy (the MicroStrategy rebrand) standing out thanks to its colossal Bitcoin reserves.

This is being powered by premiums to net asset value. Issue shares at a premium, buy more tokens, lift NAV, repeat. A flywheel that feels like public markets stumbled onto their own version of yield farming, except it’s balance sheets doing the farming.

Altcoins are no longer on the sidelines either. Solana, Sui, Toncoin, and WLFI have all found their way into corporate treasuries. New U.S. GAAP fair-value rules reduced accounting friction, giving CFOs more comfort to allocate.

Critics argue that this crowds out early-stage seed funding, but the market impact is undeniable, treasuries helped ETH hold above $4,300 and kept BTC accumulation steady.

Is your company holding crypto on its balance sheet? Would you if you could?

The Frontier Builders. ICP DFINITY Quantum Leap Labs

It’s one thing to follow the money. It’s another to see what that money builds. Behind every headline-grabbing raise is a team turning whiteboards into working code, pushing boundaries in real-time. And nowhere is that more obvious than in the Internet Computer ecosystem.

Asia’s BTCFi Stage. Runes Asia 2025

Soho House Hong Kong logged over 1,500 registrations for Runes Asia 2025, co-hosted by Omnity Network and ICP Hubs with RunesCC as organizer. The summit opened Hong Kong Bitcoin Week with discussions on issuance models, liquidity engines, and cross-chain frameworks.

ICP’s Chain Fusion and Omnity’s REE give an overview of the infrastructure, while Kraken listings of DOG, MIM, and PUPS hinted that markets are ready. Standard entry was free, with a $19 guaranteed seat tier, a small price for access to Asia’s flagship BTCFi gathering.

What Happens When Builders Skip the Hype and Build ?

EEncode Club is kicking off the ICP Bitcoin DeFi Bootcamp on September 8. Four weeks, all online.

Week one covers Bitcoin apps on ICP, week two dives into Chain Fusion, week three runs live demos, and week four focuses on on-chain encryption.

Workshops include an ICP intro on September 8 and a Liquidium demo on September 24, all aimed at showing what happens when developers build beyond the buzz.

Ignition. AI Lands on the Internet Computer

DFINITY has completed Ignition, making it possible for canisters to call LLMs directly with Motoko, Rust, or TypeScript libraries. Tool use is integrated, and AI workers relay prompts to off-chain models in real time.

Supported models include:

• Llama 3.1 8B
• Llama 4 Scout
• Qwen 3 32B.

Early uses already appear in wallet chat for OISY and in DAO sentiment analysis. Pretty damn practical steps that turn ICP into an AI-enabled chain.

Could This Be the End of Passwords

Internet Identity 2.0 is live, and it changes the login game.

Passkeys replace identity numbers, Google sign-in is enabled, and multiple accounts per identity are now possible. Upgrading preserves all existing data and keeps older apps compatible, while apps like Caffeine that already require 2.0 will demand the upgrade.

The upgrade makes authentication simpler, smoother, and more aligned with how people actually use the web.

Matcha by Quantum Leap Labs: AI for Work

Quantum Leap Labs has been building Matcha, an AI-driven platform to bring a new way for freelancers and companies in the crypto ecosystem to connect. Wait wait…waitlist is where you can join in the new tech! Register here.

Bridgeless Lending Arrives

Liquidium Luko is building cross chain lending on ICP using chain key assets such as ckBTC. ICP canisters hold threshold ECDSA keys, read Bitcoin directly, and sign transactions natively.

The ckBTC minter mints and burns against visible UTXOs with no custodial wrap. Lending pools execute on ICP with sub second liquidations. A Q4 beta follows an external audit.

Health scoring runs on a clear zero to one hundred scale with alerts.

Performance Check: Can Numbers Alone Crown a Blockchain King

ICP real time TPS about 1,130. Max over one hundred blocks near 25,621. Theoretical TPS near 209,708.

ICP Nakamoto Coefficient at 415. Highest among the listed networks.

Update on Caffeine Rollout

Caffeine is unfolding in stages, and with each one the barriers are lower.

• Phase One launched on August 19, opening the master chat to the public. Access codes are now distributed faster.
• Phase Two starts on September 16. It introduces free draft app creation, giving waitlisted users first access to the tools needed to design and test without publishing.
• Phase Three goes live on October 7. It enables paid publishing of draft apps into production, backed by a major infrastructure upgrade: blob storage.

This system reduces the cost of one terabyte from approximately $5,000 per year to just $25. Storage remains immutable and is managed through Motoko’s garbage-collected persistence layer.

What’s next..

• App market publishing and resale
• Multichain support (drafts use test ledgers, live apps run on real chains)

Further in development…

• ASIC-level performance options
• Change control systems for enterprise users
• Support for rich media workflows
• Tools for MCP-style migrations
• Developer hooks for deeper customization

Caffeine is moving with the needs of builders, right from from simple app drafts to scalable, production-grade deployments.

On that note, here’s something y’all would be curiously waiting for….

Caffeine Montreal Event!

Caffeine Montreal is set to gather AI researchers, decentralized systems builders and investors for a day of collaboration in Canada’s emerging tech hub.

You can get excited for what it will blend – technical workshops, founder showcases and networking, all designed to spotlight the frontier where AI meets decentralized infrastructure. If you want to see how new ideas move from research to market, this is the place.

Register here!

Dual Track Hackathon and AI Web3 Conference

Encode London runs 24 to 26 October at Encode Hub London.

The event pairs a full hackathon with a parallel conference. Early Bird Hack plus Conference is fifty pounds. Early Bird

Conference only is thirty pounds. Student tickets are free by approval.

Which launch excites you most, Matcha, Liquidium, or Caffeine? Vote with a tweet.

Web3 Wisdom. How No Code AI Is Unleashing the Next Generation of Decentralized Apps on ICP

No code is growing up. Add AI and it becomes a factory for new dapps. On the Internet Computer, a builder can ship an app that blends agents, cross chain access, and on chain logic without deep stacks or vendor sprawl.

Why this matters. Demand for blockchain software is wider than the developer pool. Product managers and designers can now move from idea to working prototype. ICP supplies the heavy lifting. AI workers for model access. Chain key assets for native cross chain moves. Scalable storage that keeps costs sane.

Think of it like the garage era of personal computers, except this time, the garage could be a Telegram group, a Discord channel, or a solo founder’s kitchen table.

Expect more experiments and faster cycles. Some will fail fast. Some will set new categories in DeFi social and enterprise. The next breakout may come from a no code founder who ships in days what used to take teams months.

Wrapping Up

August once again moved the narrative. Capital is choosing sharper bets, builders are cutting through the hype, and ecosystems like ICP are proving that the next wave of tools belongs to the future, not the next quarter.

Caffeine opened the door to conversational app building, Matcha showed how AI can stitch people and projects together, and Liquidium reimagined cross-chain lending without the baggage of bridges. Treasuries rewired the way public markets touch crypto, while Ignition gave developers a plug-and-play path into AI.

The momentum is here, not promised. The experiments are real, the capital is active, and the frontier is already shifting under our feet.

We’ll see you out there.
Stay sharp. Stay curious.
And keep building on the Quantum Frontier.

Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for real-time updates on crypto VC, Web3 infrastructure, AI innovation, and the Internet Computer. Thanks for reading and keep building.