Venom Foundation today unveiled Venom Labs, a new grants division seeded with $500,000 to back the next generation of Web3 projects that build natively on, or integrate deeply with, the Venom blockchain. The move formalizes a long-running effort by the Abu Dhabi–based foundation to funnel funding, technical support and go-to-market resources into teams that can deliver real-world utility and scale on Venom’s high-throughput network.
The program will provide non-dilutive grants and hands-on support to projects that demonstrate technical rigor, sustainable business models and clear user demand. Venom Labs is explicitly pitched at teams pushing blockchain use beyond classic GameFi and DeFi plays, projects that can show a launched MVP, an engaged community, a transparent token model where applicable, and a six- to twelve-month roadmap with measurable milestones.
Successful grantees will also get priority access to venom.network, the foundation’s rewards platform with hundreds of thousands of monthly active users, to run targeted campaigns and accelerate user acquisition. To kick off the fund, Venom Foundation announced two inaugural grants of $50,000 each.
NFTWood is a Real World Asset (RWA) concept that mints living trees as NFTs: purchasers receive legal title to a real tree, and its on-chain value is designed to increase as the tree grows, with physical changes documented by photo reports and immutably recorded on Venom. TimeSoul is a wellness and EdTech hybrid that blends AI-driven guidance, gamified daily practices and token rewards to incentivize mental health and habit formation. The two projects were highlighted by the foundation as emblematic of the kinds of tangible, user-facing impact Venom Labs aims to foster.
Backing Web3 Builders
Supporting builders has been central to Venom’s playbook to date. In 2024, the foundation ran the Token Forge Hackathon, an offline competition that drew 54 teams and a $200,000 prize pool; many hackathon projects have since moved onto mainnet. Venom’s larger incentive ecosystem has also been active: the foundation says Venom Quests has distributed large token rewards across multiple seasons, and Season 5, with roughly 11 million $VENOM allocated across two leaderboards, is underway. These programs, together with Venom Cases, ecosystem incentives and strategic investments, form the backbone of the network’s user-acquisition and developer-onboarding strategy.
Christopher Louis Tsu, CEO of Venom Foundation, framed Venom Labs as the next logical step in that effort: “From hackathons to quest seasons and ecosystem funds, Venom has always invested in builders. Venom Labs represents the natural evolution of that support – structured, transparent, and scaled to help the most promising teams reach millions of users. NFTWood and TimeSoul are outstanding examples of the real-world impact we want to see more of on Venom. The future of Venom is being built today.”
Technically, Venom positions itself as a platform engineered for scale and enterprise-grade availability. The foundation highlights a Threaded Virtual Machine architecture and dynamic sharding as core elements that let Venom support very high throughput with minimal fees; public materials list throughput capacity and uptime figures intended to reassure developers and institutional partners looking to deploy latency-sensitive or transaction-heavy applications.
Venom Labs is sector-agnostic and will accept applications from DeFi, gaming, infrastructure, social and AI projects, provided teams meet a set of baseline eligibility requirements. Prospective applicants must show an active community (the program asks for a minimum threshold across social platforms), a ready team able to complete KYC, existing or planned mainnet deployment, and a monetization strategy that supports long-term sustainability. Teams interested in applying are invited to submit details via the foundation’s online form.
The launch of Venom Labs comes as many layer-1 and layer-2 ecosystems double down on developer incentives to attract differentiated use cases. For Venom, a blockchain that has repeatedly emphasized enterprise readiness and high transaction capacity, the new grants program is a bet that funding early-stage, real-world applications will compound into broader network activity and user growth. Applications and more information are available through the foundation’s submission form.
