Announcing Catena Labs

We founded Catena Labs to give people direct control over their identities, assets, connections, and payments online — who you are, what you own, and how you engage, pay and play with others. We envision a web that works for humans rather than gatekeeper institutions which too often enforce misaligned policies on closed social networks, charge high fees on closed payment networks, and sell or leak personal information in central data silos.

We’ve been striving for a more equitable web since co-founding Circle and incubating technologies like the USDC digital dollar, creating global payment apps and financial infrastructure used by millions of people, and bootstrapping a decentralized identity framework endorsed by Block, Coinbase, Circle, and numerous others.

Our new venture aims to deliver app experiences that make these and similar composable protocols accessible and useful to more people everywhere. And we want to do it in a way developers can freely extend and build upon.

There is untapped power in the decentralized infrastructure and open protocols that we as a community are building to improve the web — but a lack of human-centric app experiences presents a major barrier to unlocking that power. Decentralized “web3” user experiences can feel stovepiped, confusing, fee-heavy and even risky to many people, obscuring actual utility value. So we’re creating progressively-decentralized hybrid apps and protocols that blend the best aspects of the existing web with the new utility value enabled by decentralization.

We value like-minded partners and we’re grateful for the early support and enthusiasm of a group led by Breyer Capital and joined by CoinFund, Circle Ventures, Pillar VC, CMS Holdings, Cooley and strategic angels including Balaji Srinivasan, Kevin Lin, Anita Sands, Adam Bao and Sam Palmisano along with other extraordinary private individuals.

We plan to share more soon. Meanwhile, if you’d like notification of meaningful updates in your inbox, you can share your email with us. And if you’re as passionate as we are about building these experiences, consider working with us. If you don’t see an existing role that seems quite right yet you have skills you believe we need, let us know.