NYC Founder House Concludes With $340K in Awards to Winning Teams
Some of the smartest builders from around the world descended on New York City the last weekend for Arbitrum Open House: NYC Founder House, a three-day sprint for founders to build and showcase the next generation of onchain applications.
The NYC Founder House received overwhelming interest from builders, with 473 applications; 88 teams were selected and participated in the Founder House. Over the course of the weekend, 55 projects submitted builds, competing for $340K in prizes and grants and the opportunity to become category-defining projects within the Arbitrum ecosystem.
NYC Founder House was 2026’s first in-person milestone of Open House, Arbitrum’s global founder enablement program offering $1.8M in total prizes across a series of initiatives. This includes an online buildathon that preceded it, in-person founder houses, and a dedicated mentorship program.
A Weekend of Building
Over three action-packed days, the Founder House was designed to challenge founders’ business models and help teams launch MVPs onchain. Participants were equipped with technical workshops, product sessions, mentorship hours, and live pitches while enabling an intense, collaborative environment with co-builders.
Beyond the programming, builders had direct access throughout the weekend to teams from the Arbitrum Foundation, Offchain Labs, and ecosystem partners, giving them the opportunity to discuss their projects, receive product and technical feedback, and refine their ideas with experienced operators.
The industry's leading infrastructure providers, such as Dune, Uniswap Labs, Robinhood Chain, Fhenix, Alchemy, LayerZero, and GMX, led the workshops. Sessions explored topics critical to scaling modern onchain products, from user experience and interoperability to application design and go-to-market strategies. A fireside chat with AJ Warner, Chief Strategy Officer at Offchain Labs, walked participants through Arbitrum’s evolution and shared how programs like Open House fit into the ecosystem’s broader strategy for supporting the next generation of founders.
Huge shoutout to all the sponsors and ecosystem partners – Robinhood Chain, Fhenix, LayerZero, Alchemy, Dune, GMX, and OpenZeppelin – whose teams contributed through workshops, mentorship, and active presence on the ground.
Meet The Winners
After three days of intense building and pitching, several standout teams emerged as winners across a bunch of prize categories.
First Prize at $60K: Kustodia
Crypto payments are rapidly expanding but many transactions still lack trusted safeguards. Kustodia introduces an escrow-style payment platform that enables users to create programmable payment agreements for high-value marketplace transactions (such as automobiles, real estate, or services) reducing fraud and increasing trust.
Second Prize of $40K: Laytus
Laytus is a structured prediction market protocol designed to fix a core flaw in multi-outcome positions. Traditional parlays assume full independence between outcomes, which can misprice correlated risk, leading to potential losses for investors who do not account for these correlations in their betting strategies. Laytus introduces a more accurate pricing model that helps protect liquidity providers while enabling more sophisticated prediction markets.
Third Prize of $20K: EqualFi
EqualFi is building infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets. Its flagship product, EqualIndex, is a permissionless index token primitive that allows anyone to create fully backed basket tokens representing bundles of assets.
EqualIndex is already live on the Robinhood Chain testnet, where nine index tokens have been deployed - three crypto baskets and six stock-based indices.
Besides the $120K for the top three spots sponsored by the Arbitrum Foundation and Robinhood Chain, an additional $70K is parked by the Foundation to reward founders who show progress and unlock meaningful improvements in the future.
Special Awards
In addition to the top three awards, two special prizes were awarded to projects building on Robinhood Chain, sponsored entirely by the Robinhood Chain team.
Robinhood Chain Innovation Award at $50k: Bond.Credit
Capital markets are steadily moving onchain. Bond.Credit is building a protocol that aggregates high-performing agents to enable capital-efficient allocation through standardized underwriting, which will help streamline the investment process and improve access to capital for various projects.
Founder in Residence Seed Funding at $100K: Tilt Protocol
Tilt Protocol is developing an AI-driven management layer for tokenized real-world assets, enabling users to deploy or allocate to institutional-grade trading strategies directly on the Robinhood L2. By replacing traditional prime brokers and operational infrastructure with autonomous smart contracts, Tilt aims to streamline institutional participation in onchain markets.
Honorary Mentions
Several other teams also stood out for showcasing promising ideas across payments, infrastructure, and emerging onchain financial products. These include:
• Hopscotch.trade
• GridPay
• Pledge
• Jarvis
• ChainCraft
What’s Next
Winning teams will be invited to participate in the Open House Mentorship Program with another 100K in non-dilutive awards and receive continued guidance on product development, fundraising, go-to-market strategy, and ecosystem integration.
The mentorship program is open to all teams, and interested builders can apply through the mentorship program application.
Open House 2026 is just getting started. The program will soon expand to London and Singapore with both online and IRL activities, bringing the same high-energy founder environment to builders around the world.
Happy building, and stay tuned!