From Binance Labs Incubator to EASY Residency — Seven Years of Backing Long-Term Builders

Key Takeaways: 

• YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs) maintains a seven-year track record of backing foundational builders who achieve systemic scale. This conviction is demonstrated by early-stage incubations that grew into core Web3 infrastructure and applications, including Polygon, Injective, SafePal, Dunes Analytics, and more. 
• Now an independent investment vehicle, YZi Labs expands its incubation legacy through EASY Residency, connecting founders in Web3, AI, and Biotech to build technologies that move society forward.

Seven years ago, YZi Labs began as Binance Labs, an investment initiative founded by CZ in 2017 to nurture early builders in Web3. A year later, he invited Ella Zhang – then a Stanford GSB alum and investor at Kleiner Perkins – to lead and scale the effort.

Unlike the corporates in glass towers and marble lobbies, the early Binance Labs team worked in a tiny office. When they were exhausted, they’d rest on the floor, heads down, hands still busy. They worked tirelessly with one purpose – to back the founders whose ideas could outlast market cycles.

In early 2018, the crypto market was at its loudest. New technologies were everywhere, but few with true product–market fit.

Inside Binance Labs, that chaos sparked a different question: What if we built a place where founders could tune out the noise and focus purely on creating the best products for users?

That idea became the Binance Labs Incubation Program, the first-ever Web3 incubator launched by an exchange’s investment arm.

“YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs) has always been an impact-driven fund with a long-term focus. “We began by investing in the fundamentals of Web3 — infrastructure, DeFi, stablecoins, wallets, and payments. Today, the frontier is expanding into Web3, AI, and Biotech, with new directions emerging in RWA, DeSci, prediction markets, agentic payments, and beyond. The landscape continues to evolve, but our mission remains the same: to back founders building for the long run.” said Ella Zhang, former Head of Binance Labs and now Head of YZi Labs. 

Alongside the incubation effort, Binance Labs also launched the Fellowship Grant Program, supporting open-source developers who were building the blockchain infra. 

Under Ella’s leadership, Binance Labs Incubation program grew from a small internal experiment into one of the most respected incubators in crypto. 

Season 1: Planting the Seeds of a Decentralized Future (2018)

The inaugural season of the Incubation Program was launched in October 2018. It began as a 10-week, hands-on experiment in discipline and focus. It was about finding clarity in the middle of noise — “BUIDLing,” as the early crypto community called it. 

And the results speak for themselves.

• Injective Protocol (INJ): 
  • Founded in 2018, Injective began by tackling inefficiencies in financial derivatives, building a censorship-resistant Layer-2 DEX on Ethereum that combined professional-grade trading with the transparency and self-custody of DeFi. It has since evolved into a specialized Layer-1 blockchain for finance, offering a modular suite of plug-and-play infrastructure components that power a growing ecosystem of dApps across DeFi, RWA tokenization, and advanced CLOB-based trading. The network has processed over $68.1 billion in total trading volume, including more than $4 billion in RWA trading, and supports over 25,000 transactions per second (TPS) with sub-second latency and sub-cent fees.
• SafePal (SFP): 
  • SafePal set out to make crypto security accessible, bridging the gap between usability and safety with its non-custodial wallet suite. From a trusted hardware wallet, it expanded into a CeDeFi “super-hub,” integrating yield tools, token incentives, and multi-chain access to become an all-in-one financial dashboard for a user base that has grown to 20 million+ across more than 200 regions.
• Nym
  • Nym is built to defend privacy beyond encryption, addressing metadata surveillance through a decentralized, incentivized mixnet that surpasses traditional VPNs. Its security is powered by the Nyx blockchain, built with the Cosmos SDK, and it leverages zk-nyms (anonymous credentials) to enable unobservable, fully private access for apps, wallets, and enterprises. As of the end of Q4 2024, there were 670 total nodes available for Nyx blockchain. 
• Web3Auth (formerly Torus)
  • Web3Auth (formerly Torus) simplified Web3 onboarding through one-click, non-custodial login. Its distributed key management and MPC-based security made seedless authentication possible, helping mainstream nearly 50 million users into Web3 by powering over 8,200 dApps before being acquired by ConsenSys, the company behind MetaMask.

Season 2: Scaling Up and Diversifying Impact (2019)

If Season 1 was about planting seeds, Season 2 was about scale – testing how far conviction could travel. Building on early success, the Binance Labs Incubation Program broadened its reach across continents, adding Berlin and Lagos to its original San Francisco base. 

The new cohort mirrored the maturing crypto landscape, shifting from raw experimentation to infrastructure, scalability, and data intelligence. Among them were three projects that would go on to define key pillars of Web3:

• Polygon (MATIC) 
  • Polygon emerged as a bold answer to Ethereum’s scaling bottleneck. At the time, few believed in the potential of Layer 2s. But Polygon’s founders had both vision and tenacity. Binance Labs’ early support helped refine their model, connect them to key networks, and position them to become a leading scaling solution — a vital layer of today’s blockchain stack. Today, Polygon hosts $1.485b in TVL and 1.6M in MAU. 
• Dune Analytics
  • Dune Analytic's mission was to make on-chain data accessible to anyone, empowering developers, analysts, and communities to see the inner workings of decentralized systems. Backing Dune meant investing in collective intelligence that turned blockchain data into a public resource. The platform, comparable to a public SQL database for the blockchain, hosts data for more than 100 chains, over 1.5M datasets and serves more than 1M monthly active users.
• Yellow Card
  • Yellow Card set out to be the leading fiat-to-crypto gateway for emerging markets, starting with Africa. By leveraging mobile money and local bank transfers, it bridged traditional finance with the crypto economy, making digital assets accessible to millions. Now active in over 20 countries, Yellow Card has grown into a key infrastructure layer for cross-border payments, using stablecoins and local currency APIs to power real financial inclusion.

From Binance Labs to YZi Labs — A Broader Frontier

In January 2025, Binance Labs officially rebranded to YZi Labs, marking an evolution to an independent investment vehicle and expanded the focus into Web3, AI, and Biotech. 

Ella Zhang, who returned after founding her own AI startups, brings with her a renewed sense of empathy for founders and a deeper understanding of the zero-to-one journey.

The conviction of helping builders through intensive incubation remains the same – now amplified through EASY Residency. This next-generation platform is deliberately constructed to break down silos, connecting Web3, AI, and Biotech founders who share the common internal drive of making society better. 

Season 1 successfully concluded as an immersive program in New York, gathering top global builders. Building on this success, we are now welcoming Season 2, which has expanded globally with hubs in New York, San Francisco, Dubai, and Singapore, further integrating the highly successful Most Valuable Builder (MVB) accelerator track and offering teams up to $500,000 in direct funding. 

This commitment provides founders with the resources, network, and conviction to focus on building the next generation of open systems for human progress. 

Application for EASY Residency is opened on a rolling basis: https://wkf.ms/3IA5iBk 

Stay tuned as we update more for the EASY Residency Season 2 opening this week. 

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. 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 designed to support founders building for the long term in Web3, AI, and biotech. The program creates a community where builders can find peers, mentors, and investors who share their conviction.

Each season brings together a select 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. 

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. 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. This article does not take into account the investment objectives, financial situation, or specific needs of any particular person and each individual is urged to consult their legal and financial advisors before making any investment decisions.