Cryptopond

Pond, online at cryptopond.xyz, operates an AI task marketplace on which a requester describes a desired outcome and humans, AI agents, and — per the company — eventually robots compete to deliver it, with payment made only for accepted results. The site's workflow has three steps: a requester describes a task in natural language and Pond's AI model helps structure it, skilled people or agents pick it up, and the requester reviews submissions and pays for the ones that qualify. Tasks span lead generation, product feedback, bug testing, recruiting, content creation, and connecting third-party agents. Agents can be engaged individually, in collaboration as a team, or in competition where only the strongest submission is paid.

The company began in a different segment. According to a January 2025 profile, Pond was founded in 2023 and initially built a user search engine over on-chain data using a graph algorithm, then shifted toward crypto-native AI by building a graph network combining on-chain social, financial, and transactional data. Its stated model layer covered data infrastructure, model training, computation, and inference, targeting use cases such as predicting malicious addresses (a security model used by GoPlus), NFT and DeFi recommendations on platforms including Zora and Gearbox, and a dynamic DeFi fee model, with planned extensions into insider-trading detection and risk management. Its lead investor described Pond as building a foundation model on on-chain data using a graph neural network (GNN) architecture intended to predict relationships among accounts, nodes, and smart contracts, and to supply context to autonomous agents.

Public listings on the site show live task campaigns from third parties including the Ethereum Foundation (a "Deep Funding" contest with $5,000 in rewards), SELAT, Two Robots Studios, Pixero, and Alfi by Text.ai, alongside a directory of agents such as an AI lead-generation agent and an n8n workflow specialist.

Founding story

Pond was founded in 2023 — April 2023 per one profile — by Dylan Zhang (co-founder and CEO) and Bill Shi. Before founding Pond, Zhang was a founding member of Spanning Labs, an interoperability project backed by Galaxy Digital and other investors, where he handled business strategy, market research, and development; he also founded WednesDAO, an Ethereum Foundation-funded DAO connecting crypto founders.

Business model

Pond intermediates between task posters (startups and enterprises seeking outcomes such as leads, product feedback, bug reports, recruiting, or content) and a supply side of human contributors and AI agents. Requesters fund reward pools per task and pay only for submissions that pass verification; the site cites examples such as a customer paying for 35 of 99 submitted product-test reports and another paying 50 of 157 contributors who submitted screen recordings. The sources do not state Pond's own take rate or fee structure.

Not stated in the sources; the platform describes reward pools paid by task posters to contributors, with $31,715 paid out in total as of the site snapshot.

Traction

Site-reported platform metrics: 403,319 users, 189 countries covered, 20 agents at work, 39 tasks completed, and $31,715 paid out. Customer examples cite 245 registrants and 99 submissions in one week for Moatt (35 paid reports), 2,300 participants and 157 screen-recording submissions for PhotoBase on a $1,000 spend (50 paid), a 1,000-verified-lead task delivered overnight by 20 people and AI agents, and 83 participants running web tasks with TinyFish over four days at 8x the reward pool's capacity. Listed agents report usage figures such as 1,208 users/3,419 runs for an AI lead-generation agent. Pond's security model is reported as used by GoPlus.

Latest developments

April 2025: launch of Pond Agent Chat, a community-built, blockchain-data-trained copilot accessible via early access at cryptopond.xyz. The current website presents an agentic task marketplace with live third-party task campaigns, an agent directory, and cumulative platform metrics; it also lists individual backers including Dean Eigenmann (Project Blanc), Illia Polosukhin (Near), Alex Cheema (Exo Labs), Spencer Noon (OurNetwork), Tesa Ho (Flashbots), and Jeffrey Lau (ENS).