The Venom Foundation today announced Venom Labs, a new grant arm seeded with $500,000 to support next-generation Web3 projects that build natively on or deeply integrate with the Venom blockchain. The move formalizes a long-term commitment by the Abu Dhabi-based foundation to infuse funding, technical support and go-to-market resources into the team to enable it to deliver real-world utility and scalability on Venom's high-throughput network.
The program provides non-dilutive grants and practical support to projects that demonstrate technical rigor, sustainable business models and clear user demand. Venom Labs clearly pitches projects that can demonstrate a team, a launched MVP, an engaged community, a transparent token model where applicable, and a 6-12 month roadmap with measurable milestones that drive the use of blockchain beyond classic GameFi and DeFi plays.
Successful grant recipients will also receive priority access to venom.network, the Foundation's rewards platform with hundreds of thousands of monthly active users, allowing them to run targeted campaigns and accelerate user acquisition. To kick off the fund, the Venom Foundation announced two initial grants of $50,000 each.
NFTWood is a Real World Asset (RWA) concept that mints living trees as NFTs. Buyers receive legal title to real trees, whose on-chain value is designed to increase as the tree grows, and physical changes are documented by photo reports and recorded immutably in Venom. TimeSoul is a wellness and EdTech hybrid that combines AI-driven guidance, gamified daily habits, and token rewards to encourage mental health and habit formation. These two projects were highlighted by the Foundation as emblematic of the tangible user impact that Venom Labs seeks to foster.
Helping Web3 builders
Builder support has been central to Venom's strategy to date. In 2024, the Foundation held an offline competition called Token Forge Hackathon, with 54 teams participating and a total prize pool of $200,000. Since then, many hackathon projects have migrated to mainnet. Venom's large incentive ecosystem is also active. According to the Foundation, Venom Quest has handed out large token rewards over multiple seasons, with Season 5 underway with approximately $11 million in VENOM across two leaderboards. These programs, along with Venom Cases, ecosystem incentives, and strategic investments, form the backbone of the network's user acquisition and developer onboarding strategy.
Venom Foundation CEO Christopher Louis Tsu framed Venom Labs as the next logical step in that effort: “From hackathons to quest seasons to ecosystem funds, Venom has always invested in builders. Venom Labs represents a natural evolution of that support, structured, transparent, and at scale to help the most promising teams reach millions of users. NFTWood and TimeSoul is a great example of the real-world impact we want to see more of in Venom's future.''
Technically, Venom positions itself as a platform designed for scale and enterprise-grade availability. This foundation highlights threaded virtual machine architecture and dynamic sharding as core elements that enable Venom to support very high throughput at minimal cost. The publication lists throughput capacity and uptime numbers intended to reassure developers and institutional partners looking to deploy latency-sensitive or transaction-heavy applications.
Venom Labs is sector agnostic and accepts applications from DeFi, gaming, infrastructure, social, and AI projects, provided the team meets a set of basic eligibility requirements. Prospective applicants must demonstrate an active community (the program requires minimum standards across social platforms), a team ready to complete KYC, an existing or planned mainnet deployment, and a monetization strategy that supports long-term sustainability. Teams interested in applying should submit their 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 its enterprise responsiveness and high transactional capabilities, the new grant program is a bet that funding early-stage real-world applications will lead to broader network activity and user growth. Applications and further information are available on the Foundation's submission form.
