Inside the BTCfi & Payments Fellowship on Sui

Main Takeaways

• A four-week fellowship from Sui, Walrus, and Press Start fast-tracked founders building the next wave of BTCfi and payment products.
• Seven early teams joined and spent the month refining their products through hands-on workshops, peer reviews, and mentorship.
• The cohort showed why teams in this space are choosing Sui: performance that supports fast, simple and scalable payment experiences.

Overview

BTCfi and crypto payments are moving fast: stablecoins move billions daily, remittances are becoming instant, and AI agents are beginning to transact for us.

To help founders building this next generation of financial rails, the Sui Foundation, Walrus, and Press Start Capital ran a four-week BTCfi & Payments Fellowship.

Here’s what happened inside the fellowship: the projects, the progress, and the key lessons from the first cohort.

Why Sui Backed This Fellowship

Sui’s ability to process large volumes of transactions quickly make it ideal for builders working on payments, BTCfi and agentic systems. To support early teams exploring these use cases, the Sui Foundation partnered with Walrus and Press Start Capital to create a focused, hands-on fellowship for founders at the earliest stage.

Press Start writes first checks for Web3 founders and runs pre-accelerator fellowships built around a community of builders learning alongside one another. Since 2022, their alumni have gone on to raise, or join top accelerators, such as Alliance DAO, a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, a16z Speedrun, Binance Labs, Colosseum, and Y Combinator.

The mission is simple: provide hands-on support and back early teams.

As Christian Thompson, Managing Director at the Sui Foundation, notes, “Combining the mentorship of Press Start with advisors from Sui and Walrus creates a powerful blend of entrepreneurial and technical firepower for the next generation of innovators.”

What the Fellowship Offered

The BTCfi and Payments Fellowship was designed as a short, high-intensity program. Across four weeks, teams joined roughly three sessions a week covering customer development, product–market fit, go-to-market, token design and fundraising. 

Sessions were led by builders who had already shipped, investors with real experience and technical specialists from Sui and Walrus. Workshops were practical and interactive, including AMAs, founder stories and hands-on exercises.

Founders also learned from one another through weekly ‘Show & Tells’, peer feedback and direct network-building. Each team received a $25,000 investment from the Sui Foundation, with the opportunity for follow-on investment from Press Start.

Meet the Cohort

Seven teams joined the Fellowship, which ran from October to November 2025, with each building a different part of the future of payments and Bitcoin-native finance. Below, we introduce each project, explain the problem they’re solving, and share what they took away from the four-week program.

Blend 

Blend is building the next evolution of DeFi savings. Earlier versions of DeFi focused on simple lending or permissionless markets. Blend introduces an adaptive, quant-layer-driven layer that tracks market conditions and automatically adjusts strategies as liquidity shifts. 

The result is a more resilient and automated way for users to earn on their assets without constantly managing positions. Blend powers its own simple, one-click savings product, and it also provides an underlying strategy engine that other teams can integrate.

“The fellowship sped everything up. Weeks of direct feedback and real founder advice replaced months of slow, isolated guessing,” said Manny, Co-Founder of Blend.

Encrypto 

Encrypto turns your self-custodial wallets into a bank. Today, DeFi and traditional financial rails are disconnected. Encrypto fixes this by linking everyday rails like IBAN, ACH, wires, and routing numbers directly to your wallets, while adding crypto-native features such as spending liquid tokens via card, and a savings account that earns DeFi yield.

“Sui and Press Start curated really valuable speaker sessions and panels that gave insight into the early stages of starting a company that are usually only gleaned through first-hand experience, allowing us to really refine our product strategy and vision,” said Brandon Sanchez and Alexis Soto, Co-Founders of Encrypto.

Intuipay 

Intuipay helps students and researchers fund education and open science without needing to understand blockchain. Its first product is a crypto-invisible crowdfunding marketplace that connects backers with credible research projects, offering faster, cheaper and more transparent access to funding, and opening participation in science.

“Both the Sui and Press Start teams were very prompt and helpful in providing feedback and offering introductions,” said Harry Zhang, Co-Founder of Intuipay. “I would recommend this fellowship to any post-idea, pre-accelerator stage founders.”

PIVY 

PIVY fixes one of crypto’s biggest user experience gaps: sharing a wallet address exposes your entire financial history. With PIVY, users simply share a payment link or username to receive funds privately, without revealing balances or past transactions. Sign in with Google or X, claim a username and start receiving payments in under a minute.

“We loved how it wasn’t just speaker sessions. We got practical templates and real insight into how VCs think. The fundraising session in particular was eye-opening,” said Febi Mettasari, Co-Founder of PIVY.

Silo 

Silo makes crypto payments feel as easy as sending a message. Users simply pay someone’s @handle, and Silo handles everything in the background — delivering funds across chains with privacy by default. It removes the complexity of bridges, addresses and chain selection, turning crypto payments into just payments.

“The fellowship was like a fast-forward button. In a few weeks, we got more practical feedback, founder-to-founder advice, and honest conversations than months of building in isolation,” said Aaron Tanner, Founder of Silo.

Surgepay 

Surgepay makes sending money back home as easy as using Venmo. Transfers arrive instantly with zero fees, giving underserved communities a faster, cheaper alternative to traditional remittance services. No waiting days, no hidden costs, no friction. Behind the scenes, Surgepay handles settlement, conversion, compliance and liquidity through remittance-specific infrastructure so the user experience stays simple.

“The speaker sessions helped us set a clear foundation for our goals, and the weekly check-ins were invaluable in sharpening our positioning,” said Deepansh Singh, Founder of Surgepay, reflecting on the program’s practical impact.

WAP3 

WAP3 lets AI agents pay each other automatically and safely, but with instant verification and transparent, on-chain records. Today, agents can reason, communicate and trade information, but they lack a native way to handle money. WAP3 aims to fill that gap with a unified pipeline for intent, verification, programmable settlement and auditability.

“The most rewarding part of the fellowship was the close collaboration with the Sui and Walrus engineering teams, which deepened my understanding of on-chain verification and payment infrastructure,” said Nelson Jing, Founder of WAP3. “Engaging with other Fellows was both inspiring and energizing, providing valuable perspectives.”

What This Cohort Shows

This cohort highlights how quickly BTCfi and payments are maturing, and how wide the design space has become. Rather than speculative experiments, these teams are building for real users and real problems: instant and affordable remittances, private-by-default payments, adaptive savings tools, and agentic settlement layers.

Across the cohort, a few themes stood out. 

Builders are prioritising user experience over protocol complexity. They’re designing systems that abstract away chains, addresses and liquidity management. And they’re leaning into infrastructure like Sui that can support high-volume, low-latency activity — a requirement for payments and agentic systems that need to operate reliably at scale.

Stay Connected and Register Your Interest

The BTCfi and Payments Fellowship brought together early-stage founders, technical mentors from Sui and Walrus and hands-on support from Press Start, creating four weeks of fast learning and real progress. As this cohort wraps, the focus now shifts to supporting the next wave of builders.

If you would like to be notified about future founder programmes or ecosystem opportunities, please register your interest using the form below. This helps us reach the right teams early and ensures you receive updates as soon as any new initiatives go live.

We’re excited to see what the next generation of founders builds on Sui.

Register your interest in future fellowships here.