DeFi Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

EthosX is a decentralized finance platform creating end-to-end financial derivatives on blockchains. No centralized exchanges, clearinghouses, depositories, clearing banks, CSD participants etc. required. We are starting with cryptocurrency options first, with the intention to move towards other crypto derivatives and traditional finance derivatives eventually. For example, one can buy a bitcoin hedging token directly from EthosX without involving any exchange or counterparty and earn profits when the bitcoin price is falling (similar to a put option). It is perpetual and is completely on-chain, end-to-end. It is held as a token in wallets and can be sold/transferred to anyone at any time. At institutional level, using EthosX’s options infrastructure two hedge funds can trade high-value on-chain options with each other directly without involving any banks or brokers with zero counterparty risk and zero settlement risk. We are also providing derivatives infrastructure to other crypto companies who want to use these products as a part of a larger package to their customers. Global derivatives ecosystem is broken. Derivatives trading in traditional finance has way too many gatekeepers and intermediaries. Crypto was supposed to be free of these issues and a solution to all of this, but it is itself getting more and more centralized with disastrous consequences. We at EthosX intend to pick the best of both worlds and change the way retail and institutional financial derivatives are traded world over.

Internet broke physical boundaries in commerce and made it global. It never happened in finance. Almost all financial consumer apps are country specific. Stablecoins are the internet moment for finance industry. Cypher lets an user download an app from anywhere in the world and have a bank account in 5 mins and start transacting with the crypto card. Can instantly send USDC to anywhere in the world.

We are building Flux- Flux is a Mobile App for merchants, freelancers, regular users(P2P) to make and accept payments from their customers anywhere in the world using crypto or fiat. We have built a mobile app that uses the merchants’ phone number, creates a wallet enabling them to receive payments in crypto or fiat without having to go to an exchange or pay expensive fees. Merchants can accept payments in crypto or in fiat. Payments made in Crypto can easily convert into fiat due to the built in fast reconciliation and is made available for spending immediately. Currently the vast majority merchants receive payments in crypto because of two issues (1) Paypal, Venmo, CashApp or Square to not exist in Africa and (2) the local currency fluctuates more than bitcoin due to inflation. But in order for merchants to receive money in crypto and exchange it into fiat they resort to crypto exchange apps and crypto addresses to receive payments which is a very complicated and expensive process. Merchants want to be paid quickly with the lowest amount of fees possible. This is why we are building Flux

The global cryptocurrency derivatives exchange Inventors of bitcoin VIX, the first low latency perpetual futures exchange and more

Hiro System builds developer tools for Bitcoin L1 and the Stacks L2 (layer-2). Stacks is a Bitcoin layer for smart contracts; it's an open-source project with an ecosystem of independent entities. Hiro serves 350M+ monthly API requests and thousands of crypto users on dev products.

Magna is building a platform to turn DeFi investments into financial primitives. Our first product is Carta for Web3, where companies can manage their cap tables and distribute their token equity to employees, advisors, or investors. We’re also building investor infrastructure for institutions to custody investments with on-chain execution and intelligence. Our ultimate goal is to use locked tokens as composable building blocks to power collateralized lending, liquid secondary markets, and other DeFi applications. Launching a token? Let's chat. Are you receiving tokens from your investments? We can also be helpful. What are our companies saying about the problem? > Having it all bundled together would make life easier. We have a million things to do. If you have an off-the-shelf thing, we’d use it. > This wouldn’t be a nice to have, it’d be a have to have. > Terrible process. We’re manually sending out transactions, going to solscan and manually check that they received our token. Takes hours every week. > Everything we do is potentially very dangerous. We have to check it thoroughly. I’ve spent several hours a day on this since launch. I imagine every month, it’ll take us at least 1-2 days. > Manual process every month for the ops team. They likely burn a week.... every month to pay out 150+ addresses.