Overview & operations
2025 marks the first year Pollen Labs has operated as an independent organization. Previously, we were grateful for the opportunity to be born and nurtured within the Ethereum Foundation during 2023–2024, where we had the freedom to design and prototype across privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, and blockchain research with the Privacy & Scaling Exploration team.
Today, we are officially a Canadian-registered corporation operating as a social enterprise, continuing the mission we set out in 2023.
Operating as an independent corporation comes with its own challenges. Since our inception, we have focused on building public-good projects. Without long-term financial backing, everything we do now must be grounded in a mindset of self-sustainability.
Our achievements
2025 was a vibing year. As our ideas took shape, we turned to AI to bring them to life. What we have built and are currently incubating includes:
BFlow
A blockchain-powered technology used in the Enaleia Hub. BFlow is a traceability and impact-reporting system that enables small- and medium-sized circular-economy organizations to track materials from origin to consumer through a distributed network approach. It also includes impact reporting, allowing the organizations to leverage blockchain capabilities to demonstrate their efforts. The project encompasses an admin portal, a public dashboard, a mobile application, and the underlying algorithms and libraries that power blockchain submissions and traceability events.
This idea grew shortly after BFlow while working closely with Enaleia. We identified an opportunity to enable the public to contribute photographs as data to support long-term monitoring of ocean health. As AI continues to advance, we believe these photographs can serve as an open-access archive of ocean health data for scientists to use in future research.
Supported by the Optimism Collective, Reef.Regen is a simple tool designed to help organizations such as MesoReef DAO submit and showcase coral restoration efforts on-chain. It has received very positive feedback from marine scientists and is already planned for a v2 feature set. This was a fully vibe-coded application, developed in 7 days, including QA.
In 2025, we realized how deeply motivated we are to leverage technology to support environmental and climate-focused projects. We also believe there are many other areas, such as physical infrastructure, public health, and internet culture, where we can ideate with the same goal: creating a better living environment for all.
The lessons
2025 was a year of learning for us. Not only did we need to learn how to operate without the comfort of an unlimited budget, but also how to push technology to its practical limits.
Building web3 projects is not easy
As a team rooted in the Ethereum Foundation ecosystem, this was not a new realization. Previously, when tooling was missing, we relied on teammates in PSE to build foundational layers from scratch, authentication, data storage, and more often had a raw but functional version.
Now, as we aim to ship quickly and test hypotheses, we need to rely on existing and mature tooling. With vibe coding and limited documentation, building things properly became challenging. Every single feature could become a new breaking point—even authentication.
Most Web3 tooling is built with a web-first assumption. When pushing toward cross-platform mobile experiences, things often break until upstream tooling catches up. This experience helped us better understand why many developers hesitate to build Web3 applications: the ecosystem remains immature, and standards are fragmented.
Vibe with know how to vibe
Another major lesson was learning how to vibe. As a design-driven team, we naturally approach everything from a design perspective. We initially tried applying a traditional agile methodology to vibe coding, but it quickly became difficult to manage due to the volume of AI-generated documentation.
Without a strong shared context, each new agent would approach problems differently, creating loops rather than progress. Our current approach is to plan without AI first. Once a strategy is aligned internally, we create minimal product requirements documentation for a single feature.
We don’t bring epics to agents, only tasks. Tasks are kept minimal and singular. We also shifted from polishing UI from day one to starting with no UI at all. Functionality and bug-free behavior are always the first priority; UI polish comes later.
Public good projects are mini NGOs
Building public good projects without financial backing is challenging. Balancing a clear mission with sustainability without defeating the purpose of being a “public good” requires careful thinking. We want projects to be widely used so they can truly fulfill their mission.
In practice, this means adopting NGO operational methodologies: seeking grant funding, establishing donation flows, identifying partners, and collaborating strategically. All of these factors are essential to sustaining public good projects.
We believe these learnings have solidified our operational foundation. While we are strong in design thinking and innovation, these softer operational skills make us more resilient as a team.
Conclusion
Time really flew by in 2025, especially while working in deep focus. We look forward to positive changes, both in the industry and within ourselves. A few wishes we want to share as takeaways:
- Agile methodology is a solid foundation, but with vibe coding, there is room for more modern, adaptive approaches that are easier for builders to adopt.
- For Web3 tooling, we want to see pricing models that better support public good use cases. Adoption will grow significantly in 2026, and lowering barriers will help the Web3 industry scale.