Nitro, a new accelerator built around the Monad blockchain, launched applications Tuesday with a blunt goal: fix the industry’s recurring problem of teams that raise capital fast but ship product slowly. The program will back up to 15 early-stage teams with as much as $7.5 million in total funding — up to $500,000 per project — across a three-month accelerator split between New York residencies and remote work. Unlike many crypto programs that prioritize short-term growth or token-driven metrics, Nitro is explicitly “execution-first”: it’s structured around shipping cadence, product validation, and hitting product–market fit. Who it’s looking for: teams building infrastructure, developer tools, and user-facing applications on Monad. Preference will go to founders who’ve already demonstrated consistent shipping and have a clear path toward product-market fit. The cohort ends with a Demo Day aimed at crypto and tech investors — including Paradigm, Electric Capital, Dragonfly, and Castle Island Ventures — who Nitro says will provide active mentorship, feedback, and Demo Day engagement rather than just lending brand names. The accelerator launches into an ecosystem flush with capital. Projects building on Monad have already raised more than $108 million, while Monad itself has drawn about $244 million in funding from backers such as Paradigm and Coinbase Ventures. The Monad foundation markets the chain as a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer 1 designed for high-frequency finance and autonomous systems; mainnet is slated to go live in November 2025. In short: the cash is there, the missing ingredient Nitro is targeting is disciplined execution. A quick market backdrop: Bitcoin (BTC) trades near $70,096, down about 0.6% over 24 hours; Ethereum (ETH) sits around $2,104, up roughly 0.5%; Solana (SOL) is about $86.70 after a choppy week that saw intraday prints above $89. If prior cycles rewarded narratives and inflated valuations, Nitro is making a narrower, verifiable bet: in a capital-heavy corner of crypto, the teams most likely to matter are the ones that can actually ship—and sustain themselves without relying on the next hype wave. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news