KH | Ascendwave Partners

investor | advisor | ex-googler

[Poetiq @poetiq_ai]

Poetiq's Meta-System built its own coding harness from scratch. It got SOTA on LiveCodeBench Pro.

No fine-tuning, no special model access. Just standard APIs. Using Gemini 3.1 Pro, it made a harness that beat all frontier models we tested.

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

아무도 얘기하지 않고 관심도 없을때 조용히 일어나는 일.

vs

누구나 얘기하고 관심이 높은 뜨거운 시장에서 일어나는 일

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

Go Showdown!

[Showdown.win @showdown_gg]

Backed by the best, accelerating gaming onchain.

If you missed the in-person demo day and want to learn more about our vision - sign up to online demo day now! 👇

[Showdown.win @showdown_gg]

Showdown Closed Alpha is LIVE on @solana.

Showdown is the first platform that lets gamers wager on their own matches, against friends or foes using $SOL or $USDC.

Players can compete and profit from their victories on some of the world’s most played games, starting with Counter-Strike 2 and Chess, with more leading titles coming soon.

Access is exclusive, you’ll need a referral code from existing players, or you can join the waitlist on our site or open a ticket in Discord for review.

This is the start of a new era in gaming, where your skill becomes your asset.

Compete. Win. Profit. Bet on yourself.

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

a great article on the market crash 2 days ago.

[YQ @yq_acc]

https://t.co/wwn5yY6ZPA

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

폭풍이 칠때는 아무것도 안보인다. 그런데 폭풍은 곧 지나가고 맑은 날씨가 온다.

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

비슷한 것들이 너무 많이 나오면 언제나 consolidation이 일어나기 마련.

[Delabs Games🐞 @delabsOfficial]

Web3 gaming needs a new foundation.

Led by @hashed_official, @TheSpartanGroup and @TON_Ventures and backed by our parent company 4:33 Creative Lab, Delabs Games has secured $17.2M in total funding to bring mid-core gaming directly into your favorite social apps and charging into the next frontier of gaming powered by AI.

$DELABS incoming

[Delabs Games🐞 @delabsOfficial]

$DELABS: the genesis of a new gaming order.

Are you tuned in? 🐞

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

Are you sure you're setting your platform up for success from the start? The initial strategy is critical. My latest article, "Buttoning the First Button," offers a founder's guide to getting it right.

https://t.co/83H0L7ZGLz

#PlatformBuilding #StartupAdvice #ProductStrategy

[Showdown.win @showdown_gg]

Today, we’re excited to announce some of the participants from Showdown’s pre-seed round.

We’re honored to welcome:

@sreeramkannan (Founder, EigenLayer), @sandeepnailwal (Co-Founder, Polygon), @nickwh8te (Co-Founder, Celestia), @eulerlagrange (Co-Founder, Opacity Network), @ArcanumCapital, @3point0_vc, @npcgroup_xyz, @questbookapp

They join a select group of early-stage funds and angels who believe that millions of gamers deserve a fair shot at monetizing their passion and talent — without gatekeepers, fraud, or waiting weeks to get paid.

In just a few short months on @monad_xyz's testnet:

- Showdown went live with fully automated prize pools and trustless skill-based wagering on AAA titles like Counter-Strike 2 and Chess (with Fortnite being battle-tested as we speak).

= We’ve hosted top SEA Counter-Strike teams, grandmasters in chess, and a growing wave of creators who run matches and stream showdowns.

- Showdown has partnered with over 15 colleges and gaming communities to bring competitive tournaments to grassroots players - the backbone of any real gaming ecosystem.

- Showdown is building a robust anti-cheat and a simple but powerful clan system - so friends can squad up and challenge the world.

- Showdown has distributed more than 1000+ skins for Counter Strike 2 players.

For every match played, every wager settled, every player who put their skills on the line - you validated what we believed:

The next frontier for gaming isn’t just new titles - it’s financializing skill for everyone.

What’s Next?

More games: Expanding beyond CS2 and chess into more titles that players love.

Mobile-first: A seamless mobile app so playing, wagering, and cashing out feels as smooth as it should.

Stronger clans & creator tools: Enabling community leaders, streamers, and tournament organizers to run trustless, profitable events for their fans.

Anti-cheat innovation: Deepening our fairness stack so skill always wins.

Global growth: From local college leagues to global open tournaments — everyone’s invited.

We wouldn’t be here without:

- The players who signed up early and took a chance on a new way to compete.

- The communities and college gaming clubs who ran the first tournaments and gave us honest feedback.

- The creators and streamers who helped us reach new players, one battle at a time.

- The investors and advisors who saw the same potential we did - [and pushed us to make it real.

If you’re a player who wants to earn for your skill, a creator who wants to host matches for your community, or just someone who loves the thrill of fair competition - we’re building this for you.

The Showdown has only just begun.

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

Google I/O 2025 just took place, and it was truly remarkable.
It clearly showed that the massive transformation AI will bring to industries is not far off—and that the impact will be nothing short of disruptive.

My summary + analysis below:

https://t.co/FgupHGLs8a

[Showdown.win @showdown_gg]

Did someone say Fortnite?

We just launched a Showdown x Monad branded server on Fortnite, called the Pit!

Players can:

🎯 Progress their Battle Pass
🏆 Complete achievements
📈 Climb an incentivized leaderboard (soon)

This is Showdown’s next step in bridging web2 gameplay with web3 infrastructure — seamlessly, trustlessly, and at scale. Phase 2 will see deeper level of integrations into Showdown's modules.

Hop in, earn, and play better!

[Showdown.win @showdown_gg]

It’s LIVE. Calling all Chess lovers!

Showdown just rolled out some major Chess features!

Chess Wagering:

🆚 Head to the Duels section on the website
🎯 Challenge friends or other chess players
🪙 Wager TMON in public/private 1v1s with instant payouts

Win2Earn:
♟️Play ranked matches on https://t.co/78PmeAg4H9 with any global user!
📈 XP rewards (dropping soon)

Web2 UX. On-chain rewards.

It's Showdown time!

[Showdown.win @showdown_gg]

Chess wagering drops next week!

Tag a friend you’re about to school and take their TMON👇

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

People are saying web3 gaming is dead. I disagree. Integrating crypto experience into Counter Strike, Lichess, and Fortnite is happening.

[Showdown.win @showdown_gg]

Showdown is bridging the Web 2 gaming ecosystem with the crypto ecosystem, for the first time ever - with the sexiest UX game-fi has seen.

And its happening on Monad.

https://t.co/6W87IjNsVY

Soon, play Fortnite to earn Showdown XP and more rewards.

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

Delabs has been built with the founder's tremendous experience leading mobile gaming for decades. It's time for people to really understand their core competence and growth potential.

[Delabs Games🐞 @delabsOfficial]

We’re excited to collaborate with @AKEFish_io to drive the next wave of Web3 gaming adoption on social platforms with @kaiachain and @ton_ecosystem!

AKEDO Games is transforming gaming by empowering 1 billion players to become game creators with AI Agents. Backed by Karatage, Collab+Currency, The Open Platform, TON Ventures

Together, we’re committed to expanding the Web3 gaming ecosystem—stay tuned for the exciting collaboration!

https://t.co/ot8TrQZzLp

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

token value is important, but it sometimes(or always?) creates unnecessary distraction. focus on product + users is the only tool for good price. go Carv!

[CARV @carv_official]

Times like this, keep your eyes away from the charts.

Join our community instead.

Become a CARVer: https://t.co/cNbKFCUHNc

[KH | Ascendwave Partners @phpstar]

there's no secret success recipe. it's always great product + strong users/community support.

[Luke Barwikowski 🚜 @whatslukedoing]

What's good about @pixels_online is regardless of market conditions we can still build and test our tech.

The core of what we're working on is solving p2e at scale - clown me all you want - we're not there yet, but each month we're getting closer.

We have been giving out rewards to users at scale and building out models & prediction on what happens when you give a reward to a certain segment / cohort of users.
What we want to know are things like, if you are able to use rewards to increase revenue, to increase ARPPU, to decrease initial time to first monetization, to boost retention of certain cohorts? Can you start to build predict what users early on in the journey will convert?

This tech works without crypto too. If you build these models you can them with fiat, stables, or any currency.

How I kind of view p2e is basically through this framing: If you were able to boost certain metrics in your web2 game like retention, LTV, or k-factor by 20-30% how much more successful would it be? That's where p2e can be applied.

Pixels has been able to increase it's reward efficiency from 28% to ~70% in the last 6 months - and to be honest the biggest thing in our way has been our core game. The core game is improving month-by-month, but what's interesting is we can also accelerate our progress by working with other games too.

We're already opening our tech & current models to other teams. What's interesting is that the ecosystem may have an even better chance to reach our goal of net revenue when working with other games even quicker.

This tech that we're building will be able to generate other revenue streams outside of our main token - there are already other teams we're talking to that have willingness to pay.

Web3 offers other very interesting ways to tokenize this business model. At the end of the day, we're building our own first-party games (new ones like our pets app on the way) - but the bigger picture is we're also building a new type of ad network.

What we're building is kind of like an ad network where we reward users to participate in good / positive ecosystem behavior.

Regardless of how you feel about core pixels & state of the game - (believe me we love Core Pixels and are dedicated to making it as good as we possibly can) - there is also something bigger here that we're building - this tech is important, has real value, and people are willing to pay for it.

Teams that build things of real value are not going anywhere in the long-run. Clown us in the short-term if you want but teams that are persistent in building real things will win.

You don't have to believe in what we're doing - but I do & will keep building 🫡