Apply to EASY Residency S4 — Build Inside Bhutan's New Sovereign Tech City

Start 5 weeks from anywhere. Finish 5 weeks in Bhutan. One cohort unlike any before.

Main takeaways:

• Season 4 of EASY Residency is a 10-week founder program — 5 weeks online + 5 weeks in person — running the second half on the ground inside Bhutan, including Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC), a newly chartered Special Administrative Region built for blockchain, AI, and frontier tech.
• Accommodation, meals, and workspace in Bhutan are fully covered. Founders just bring the work.
• Priority sectors: across Web3, AI, and biotech — with a particular focus on global payments (stablecoin infra, settlement rails, neobanks), the agentic economy (agent wallets, agent-to-agent settlement, agentic finance), next-gen DeFi (on-chain credit, RWA rails, decentralized insurance), AI infrastructure (agent infra, chips, hardware, vertical robotics), and AI × Bio and Web3 × bio (clinical AI, drug discovery, decentralized health data). Full thesis below.
• Applications close at 23:59 (GMT-7) on June 21. Apply here: wkf.ms/3IA5iBk 

Building with YZi Labs at the newest frontier 

YZi Labs' EASY Residency Season 4 is the inaugural global founder cohort to build inside ≈ (GMC),  Bhutan's new Special Administrative Region.

In the fragile, early stages of a startup, a founder's most scarce commodity is cognitive bandwidth. GMC is a sovereign jurisdiction crafted to protect that bandwidth, blending forward-thinking crypto regulation with a distraction-free, low-overhead lifestyle. Bhutan is an oasis built for deep work. Surrounded by its profound tranquility and stillness, the noise of the outside world fades, allowing founders to enter a pure, uninterrupted flow state. By anchoring the world's boldest builders in the earth's most focused and peaceful environment, we create the perfect vacuum for compounding innovation.

The program runs for 10 weeks, structured as 5 weeks online plus 5 weeks in person in Bhutan.

• Weeks 1–5 (online): Onboarding, deep co-building with YZi Labs investors on GTM, hiring, capital strategy, and mechanism design. Founders continue running their companies from wherever they are.
• Weeks 6–10 (in person, Bhutan): The full cohort relocates to Bhutan. Workshops, 1:1s, and community sessions happen in the same building where the cohort lives and builds. The week closes with Demo Day.

What Gelephu Mindfulness City actually is

The cohort will operate on the ground in Bhutan, including Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC). A few facts about the city that much of the world hasn’t discovered yet:

• It's massive and strategically positioned. 4,046 km² on the Bhutan–India border —five times the size of Singapore — at the land bridge connecting more than 2 billion people across South and Southeast Asia.
• It's sovereign. Established by Royal Charter in December 2024 as a Special Administrative Region with full executive, legislative, and judicial independence. Think Shenzhen, Dubai, or Hong Kong at Year Zero, except the policy stack is written specifically for crypto, AI, green energy, and longevity.
• It's crypto-native. Bhutan has committed up to 10,000 BTC from its sovereign reserves to underwrite GMC's build-out — the Bitcoin Development Pledge.
• The infrastructure is being built. A data center for AI and on-chain finance. A new international airport. A master plan by Bjarke Ingels Group — eleven neighborhoods inspired by the Mandala, woven through 35 rivers and streams.
• A different measure of progress. Bhutan is the world's only carbon-negative nation to have enshrined Gross National Happiness, not GDP, as a constitutional standard, weighting spiritual well-being, cultural preservation, environmental health, and good governance alongside economic output.

"YZi Labs represents the kind of long-term partner Gelephu Mindfulness City was designed to attract - builders focused not only on both technological advancement, and real-world impact. Bhutan offers founders something increasingly rare: the space to think long term, operate with clarity, and build within a culture that values purpose, trust, and human wellbeing alongside innovation. We are pleased to welcome YZi Labs to this growing ecosystem.”."

— Jigdrel Singay, Board Director of Gelephu Mindfulness City.

What founders get covered

1. Investment

EASY Residency founders may receive up to $500,000, structured as:

• $150,000 for 5% equity (plus other rights, where applicable) via a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE).
• An additional $350,000 on an uncapped SAFE.

2. Infrastructure for builders

• Accommodation & meals in Bhutan: fully covered for the duration of the in-person residency.
• Workspace: dedicated cohort workspace inside Bhutan, designed for focused in-person building.
• Travel logistics: the cohort will receive guidance and support throughout the visa application process. Founders are expected to cover their own flights, while on-the-ground programming and community experience will be coordinated by the program.
• Perks: an exclusive package of partner credits — including AWS, CertiK, and other essential infrastructure tools.

Where the in-person cohort will be built at (final venue still being confirmed, but the setup will be similar).

3. Hands-on acceleration

• Deep co-building with YZi Labs across GTM, hiring, capital strategy, and mechanism design.
• Weekly workshops and 1:1 sessions with industry leaders and operators – past mentors include CZ, Yi He, Balaji Srinivasan, founders, investors, and leaders from top fortune 500 companies.

What we're looking for in Season 4

What does it take to build generational technology? In Season 4, we continue to back founders building for the long term across Web3, AI, and biotech, with a particular focus on the future of global payments.

The thesis is simple: Stablecoins are the new plumbing for global finance, replacing legacy rails in cross-border FX, corporate treasury, and remittances. Looking forward, the rise of the agentic economy makes this transition non-negotiable. Autonomous AI agents, machine-to-machine commerce, and programmatic wallets cannot run on 20th-century banking rails—they require an internet-native financial coordinate system.

GMC is where this thesis becomes tangible. Positioned at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia – home to nearly 2 billion underbanked people – and paired with sovereign-level crypto policy and frontier infrastructure being built, it offers founders a rare vantage point.

See the full list of theses YZi Labs is actively investing in:

Web3 — The new financial stack

• Payment infrastructure: scalable, compliant payment-orchestration platforms connecting traditional B2B workflows with fiat↔crypto↔fiat settlement rails.
• Global routing & FX: stablecoin-powered FX routing, cross-border treasury, liquidity management, and instant settlement — especially for emerging markets.
• Institutional settlement rails: stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and programmable infrastructure replacing legacy banking ledgers for real-time, cross-border institutional settlement.
• Neobanks & financial superapps: stablecoin-native digital banks offering global accounts, FX, remittance, savings, dollar access, and modern treasury tools for consumers, SMBs, and enterprises.
• Stablecoins 2.0: next-generation stablecoins with new yield models, reserve structures, and programmable mechanics that push stablecoins beyond crypto into broader financial infrastructure.

Web3 — Agentic economy & infrastructure

• Agentic wallets & Know Your Agent: wallet, identity, and compliance infrastructure for AI agents to securely hold funds, transact, access services, and build verifiable on-chain reputations, permissions, and credit histories.
• Agent-to-agent settlement rails: machine-native payment protocols enabling AI agents to settle instantly for API calls, compute, data, models, and task execution across open networks.
• Agentic trading & DeFi co-pilots: AI-powered trading platforms and portfolio agents for strategy design, backtesting, execution, liquidity routing, rebalancing, and yield optimization across CEXs, prediction markets, perp DEXs, and DeFi venues.
• Verifiable agent execution: TEE-, ZKP-, attestation-, or audit-trail-based frameworks to prove an AI agent executed approved models, logic, and workflows without tampering.
• DePIN infrastructure & incentive layers: frameworks that coordinate capital, hardware operators, and users to bootstrap decentralized physical infrastructure networks at scale.

Web3 — Next-gen DeFi primitives

• Institutional DeFi & trading infrastructure: tooling connecting institutional capital to decentralized markets via dark pools, smart routing, composable risk layers, privacy, and unified trading terminals across spot, perps, RWAs, and prediction markets.
• Perp layer for prediction markets: a margin and lending layer enabling leveraged outcome trading and passive yield on any event.
• On-chain credit & private markets: platforms bringing private credit and structured lending on-chain, combining real-world yield with DeFi’s transparency, programmability, and global reach.
• Tokenized macro assets & RWA rails: infrastructure for treasuries, money market funds, private credit, gold, tokenized equities, and indices, including distribution, collateralization, hedging, and structured products.
• Decentralized insurance: P&C, payment-fraud protection, chargeback coverage, and life insurance — combining the speed and cost advantages of blockchain rails with the underwriting discipline of traditional finance.

AI

• Agent infrastructure & software: orchestration, memory, workflow durability, multi-agent coordination, observability, and developer tooling that make agents production-ready for real-world deployment.
• AI-native trading and market infrastructure: Platforms that leverage autonomous agents to analyze markets, execute strategies, manage risk, and optimize financial operations in real time. We are interested in systems that combine reasoning models, data infrastructure, simulation, and execution layers to create next-generation trading, portfolio management, and market intelligence platforms.
• Chips & interconnects: next-generation compute, memory, networking, and systems innovations that unlock scalable, efficient AI deployment beyond today’s GPU-centric stack.
• AI hardware: AI-native consumer hardware where intelligent software meaningfully improves usability, productivity, creativity, or daily life — not as a superficial feature layer.
• Hardware supply chain infrastructure: software and platforms modernizing the global hardware supply chain — manufacturing optimization, procurement, logistics, component intelligence, resilience, and coordination.
• Service & SaaS automation: AI companies replacing labor-intensive services or legacy SaaS workflows with highly automated systems that compress operational overhead and enable new service delivery models.
• Vertical robotics: tightly integrated hardware-software stacks solving high-value vertical use cases in logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and construction.
• Data infrastructure for physical AI: simulation, synthetic data generation, multimodal data pipelines, annotation infrastructure, and data engines paired with lightweight model capabilities for robotics and embodied AI.
• Model evaluation & AI critics: benchmarking, interpretability, and reliability testing for AI models — foundational infrastructure for AI development as researchers and enterprises demand deeper visibility into model behavior.

Healthcare & biotech

AI × Healthcare & Bio

• Clinical AI & diagnostic intelligence: specialist-level accuracy in medical imaging, pathology, and multi-modal diagnostics — deployment-ready with clear regulatory pathways.
• AI drug discovery & target identification: foundation models and protein structure prediction accelerating preclinical timelines.
• Agentic research & lab automation: AI agents that autonomously design, execute, and interpret biological experiments, closing the loop between hypothesis and data.
• Mental health & behavioral AI: scalable AI-native platforms addressing the global mental health gap.
• Healthcare operations & revenue cycle automation: AI agents automating prior authorization, medical coding, denial management, and care coordination across hospital systems and insurance operations.

Web3 × Healthcare & Bio

• Decentralized health data & patient-owned records: protocols enabling individuals to own, permission-share, and monetize their health and genomic data while preserving privacy.
• Tokenized clinical trials & DeSci: token-incentivized patient recruitment, data contribution, and trial participation.
• Crypto-native insurance & risk pooling: on-chain parametric health and life insurance, decentralized risk pools, and smart-contract claims — lowering premiums and extending coverage to underserved populations.

If you can articulate what you're building and why only your team can build it, we want to read your application.

How to apply

Applications are open now and close at 23:59 (GMT-7) on June 21.

Apply here 👉 wkf.ms/3IA5iBk 

If you've applied to EASY Residency before, you're already in our system — we'll reach out if we decide to move forward.

Move with the frontier. Hope to meet you in Bhutan.

About YZi Labs

YZi Labs manages over $10 billion in assets globally. Our investment philosophy emphasizes impact first—we believe that meaningful returns will naturally follow. We invest in ventures at every stage, prioritizing those with solid fundamentals in Web3, AI, and biotech.

YZi Labs’ portfolio covers over 300 projects from over 25 countries across six continents. Some notable portfolios include Trustwallet, CoinMarketCap, Polygon, Injective, Ethena, Safepal Wallet, Better Payment Network, Aster, XAI, and more. More than 65 of YZi Labs’ portfolio companies have gone through our incubation programs. For more information, follow YZi Labs on X. 

About EASY Residency

EASY Residency is YZi Labs’ flagship global incubation program supporting early-stage, long-term founders across Web3, AI, and biotech. The program fosters a community where builders find peers, mentors, and investors who share their conviction.

Each season brings together a curated group of startups from around the world to live and build side by side, culminating in a high-profile Demo Day with leading investors and industry leaders.

About Gelephu Mindfulness City

Gelephu Mindfulness City is a Special Administrative Region of Bhutan, established by Royal Charter in December 2024. Spanning 4046 km² along the southern border with India, GMC is designed as a state-of-the-art jurisdiction for mindful capitalism — combining Bhutan's Gross National Happiness philosophy with a modern, technology-forward regulatory stack covering crypto, AI, green energy, and health. For more, visit gmc.bt, or follow X: @gmcbhutan and @gmcbhutancrypto. 

Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, endorsement, analysis, or recommendations with respect to any financial instruments, investments, or issuers. References to GMC's regulatory and tax framework are based on publicly available materials as of publication; founders should consult their own legal, tax, and financial advisors for current applicability. This article may contain forward-looking statements which are by nature subject to risks and uncertainties. Investment in cryptocurrency and DeFi projects involves substantial risk, including the risk of complete loss.