GN CT 🫡
Thoughts on similarites between Vangrid and AmericanFortress include how both make crypto less of a guesswork scenario.
For
@vangrid_io , everyone's heard of the current hotness of Physical AI; Jensen Huang himself declared CES 2026 the 'ChatGPT moment for physical AI', and NVIDIA's Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint at GTC highlighted the same issue of a dearth of real-world data for training. Fei-Fei Li has mentioned the same challenge holds true for robotics, albeit with less training data than for language models; you can't scrape a street corner off of the internet.
Vangrid's solution turns smartphones into a capture network that gathers on-demand ground-level 3D data of real-world locations with captures anchored onchain on the Base blockchain. The explorer currently shows over 1.18M captures, 4.4K attestations and 562K USDC settled, with a fresh batch of attestations every 30 minutes or so. You can see for yourself at
explorer.vangrid.io; web and Android have been live since July, the team is based out of Amsterdam, and they're in NVIDIA Inception. The CEO Robert Brighton came from Microsoft's Quantum Computing and HoloLens groups, and the CTO Khalid Benrafik has built systems at
Booking.com, ING and Mollie which handle transactions worth $1B+ in annual transactions. The $9M, with seed funding from HashKey Capital, Animoca Brands, Borderless Capital,
Crypto.com Capital, Gate Labs and Mapleblock Capital.
Meanwhile,
@Americanfort_io tackles the opposite end of the same problem. Most of us are still verifying a wallet address manually by checking the first and last four characters; seven matching characters caused a $50M loss. With Send-to-Name™, the copy-paste step is replaced by an @ name, and a wallet generates a one-time-only address for each payment; only the sender and recipient can derive it, only the recipient can spend it, and the payment still settles normally on the native chain. Unlike ENS-style names, a FortressName doesn't publicly point to one permanent wallet, balance or payment history.
It's live across 13 networks, and FortressChat is also live. AF isn't another chain either; it's an SDK which aims to be embedded within the wallets people already use, with Litecoin Foundation, 0G Network, Tron and Arbitrum among the integrations. On the long-term roadmap, QBIP-32 is their quantum-safe key derivation approach designed to avoid requiring users to migrate funds to a new address. SafeSend™ (proof of source of funds, selective disclosure) is still in development, so I'll withhold judgment on that for now. You can claim a free FortressName at
names.americanfortress.io.
One makes it possible to verify the network; the other removes the need to do it by hand. Seems like a good direction to be heading in.
Also, if you've been trading onchain for a while,
@zerufinance on
@NucleusCodes may already be taking your past wallet history into account towards a starting balance. Check yours at
app.zaps.wtf. The $50K Ditto trading competition is here:
app.zaps.wtf/campaigns/ditto