Some products can't exist on public blockchains: the logic is too sensitive, the data too private. That's exactly what we want you to build.
Crecimiento and Horizen are launching the Horizen Acceleration Season: a six-week online program for startups ready to build on Vela, Horizen's confidential coprocessor, and turn a first integration into a product with real users behind it.
We're selecting a small cohort worldwide to be part of the first teams building on Vela while it's still in early access, shaping the product alongside the team that makes it, top tier mentors and speakers.
Applications close August 24.
Apply to the Horizen Acceleration Season
What is the Horizen Acceleration Season?
A structured, hands-on program designed to take your startup from a first Vela integration to a working product with a clear go-to-market strategy, in six weeks.
It's a builder program where you ship a real product on Vela, get direct support from the Horizen team, and pitch on Demo Day in front of investors and ecosystem leaders.
The program follows a three-phase arc: Build, Grow, Show, opening with an onboarding week.
- Onboarding (Week 1): Onboard to the Vela landscape, meet the Horizen team, and lock your integration plan. You'll have direct access to Horizen's technical team through office hours from day one.
- Build (Weeks 2–3): Heads-down building with weekly office hours and technical pairing. Ship a working prototype: a real WASM job inside Vela with a verifiable result settling onchain.
- Grow (Weeks 4–5): Stress-test your business model, nail your GTM strategy, and figure out how you'll make money through your product. Mentors challenge your assumptions and the Horizen BD team opens doors.
- Show (Week 6): Refine your pitch, polish your demo, and deliver at the online Demo Day. This is where you prove what you've built, and what comes next.
What is Vela?
Vela is a confidential coprocessor: you package your logic as a WASM job, run it inside a sealed TEE (trusted execution environment), and settle the result onchain. In Vela's own words: "Run logic in private. Settle publicly onchain".
It's built for the cases where sensitive data and public rails need to coexist: from tokenized asset issuers seeking liquidity on public chains to trading firms protecting proprietary strategies. Local development runs in Docker with an emulated TEE, and the live environment is Base Sepolia, with Base mainnet next.
Vela is in early access, which means the teams in this cohort build alongside the people making it, and shape the product as they go.
What you get
Direct support from Horizen. Technical support (office hours, deep dives and pairing sessions with Horizen DevRel and Horizen Labs engineering) and business development guidance from the Horizen team.
Curated mentorship. Weekly masterclasses with strong speakers across technical implementation, product and design, crypto GTM, and investor readiness. Plus group mentoring sessions and private 1:1s, all managed by Crecimiento and its network.
A clear path forward. Top-performing teams will be flagged for post-program follow-on support within the Horizen ecosystem.
Who's behind this
Crecimiento is the movement driving Argentina's tech ecosystem to position the country as a global hub for innovation.
Our Acceleration Seasons are built on a simple belief: builders need real conditions to ship, a live product to integrate, the team behind it within reach, mentors who challenge the business, and a stage with investors at the end. Six weeks, one working product, one Demo Day.
It's part of a builder funnel that runs from the Aleph Hackathon through the Acceleration Seasons and into the Startup World Cup.
Who should apply?
You're a good fit if:
- You're an early-stage startup: bootstrapping, pre-seed, or seed.
- You have a product or strong prototype with a use case that genuinely needs confidential execution: private logic, sensitive data, verifiable results.
- You're ready to ship. This program moves fast: we're looking for teams that can execute in 6 weeks.
- You're based anywhere in the world. The program is fully online.
Whether you're crypto-native or a web2 team entering web3, if your product needs to verify data without exposing it, we want to hear from you.
Key dates
- Applications close: August 24, 2026
- Selected teams announced: August 26, 2026
- Program starts: August 31, 2026
- Demo Day (online): October 8, 2026