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SPOTLIGHT ON CENTI: Centi completes its payment system with launch of BSV’s first native stablecoin

By Press Release | 30 March 2023

Centi, based in beautiful Zurich, Switzerland, set out to create an entire payment system [back in 2020], and its new BSV-native stablecoin may be the final piece of that puzzle.

Centi founder/general manager Bernhard Müller has had an interesting journey. He got his start in plant pathology, then spent a decade testing medical instruments before being hired by a financial services firm in his native Switzerland to handle business development and compliance.

Long before then, he’d caught the Bitcoin bug. Bitcoin’s direct peer-to-peer transfer model appealed to Müller, who’d seen how much of traditional payment systems seemed broken…particularly, the role of fat-cat middlemen who got in between merchants and consumers wanting to pay with credit cards.

After running into Ralf Zellweger at a Bitcoin meet-up, the pair saw an opportunity to collaborate on what Muller called “a real paradigm shift in payments.” And with that, the pair co-founded Centi in 2020.

Müller has described Centi as targeting “people who don’t care about Bitcoin.” True to form, customers who use Centi at a growing number of both retail and online merchants may not even be aware of the app’s Bitcoin SV (BSV) association. They only know it works, seamlessly, for payments large or small.

While customers can fund their Centi accounts with BSV, they can also use credit cards, other payment apps such as Twint as well as IBAN transfers. In February, Centi’s Swiss customers were also given the option of popping into a local post office to top up their Centi accounts with cash!

Merchant appeal

As for where users can spend the funds in their Centi accounts, the company has set a goal of onboarding over 1,000 merchants by the end of this year. Müller said this ambitious goal is looking “very realistic” given Centi’s new “very big partnership” with PayRexx, the Swiss e-payments aggregator that has relationships with over 40,000 Swiss businesses.

While Centi continues to fully onboard merchants on its own – including its first customer in Denmark, where Centi has been approved to operate – Müller says the PayRexx deal (which will be integrated in April) offers Centi “a lot of access to the market.” It helps to have a good product to convince these merchants to hop onboard and Centi’s pitch is compelling to say the least.

First, merchants respond favorably to the fact that a Centi user can purchase items that cost less than a single franc – say, a pack of gum – via the app. The lack of a financial middleman in this transaction means the merchant retains his/her profit on the product, whereas a credit card company’s charges would eat up the merchant’s entire margin.

Second, direct payment means there are no chargebacks or dispute options. Obviously, the merchant can still offer refunds for defective products, but the customer cannot hold the merchant’s money hostage for 180 days by escalating the matter through the payment system.

Yet another perk for merchants is Centi’s open API (application programming interface). Visa and Mastercard restrict access to their APIs to certified providers, with whom merchants must first onboard, installing yet another middleman in the transaction chain.

Centi merchants – currently a 50/50 split between online and retail – can also customize what they accept as payment. This can include a mix of cash and bespoke rewards/loyalty points, even tokens issued by other merchants if they have a relationship – or decide to band together to form a new one.

BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE: A stablecoin for non-Bitcoin nerds!

Müller said Centi spent over two years building technology, first on the merchant side, ensuring that its payment method was fully compatible with existing BSV wallets. After that, the focus turned to fine-tuning Centi’s own app, which landed in Android and iOS app stores last September, adding features that many other apps didn’t have, such as top-ups.

The missing piece of this puzzle was a BSV-native stablecoin, which Müller views as crucial for onboarding people other than “Bitcoin nerds like myself.” The traditional volatility of digital assets is a major turnoff for neophytes, who might have $200 on their app, spend $30, then might not touch the app for weeks or months. When they next open the app, they expect to see $170 there. And it better all be there.

Müller says Centi’s CCHF stablecoin – which debuted on March 21 – has three key differentiators from others of its ilk. First, befitting a BSV-based product, its focus is on utility and consumer payments, including minor payments. Other stablecoins primarily focus on arbitrage traders who want to move a lot of money from one exchange to another to take advantage of a perceived price advantage in this or that token.

Secondly, unlike the constant questions surrounding the reserve assets of Tether or USDC, Centi’s stablecoin is fully backed by a Swiss bank guarantee. Even if Centi were to default, the bank will guarantee the 1:1 recoverability of its stablecoin.

Third, Centi will sell and accept stablecoins directly from customers. No need to go through an exchange, no million-dollar minimum purchases. It’s a stablecoin made for payments by everyday users, with similar top-up capabilities available via the app.

Despite his excitement for Centi’s near-term expansion, Müller says the ecosystem as a whole has a long way to go before the masses are ready to embrace direct payments with digital assets. “It’s like trying to convince everyone in the U.S. to speak Chinese tomorrow.” But with all the pieces of Centi’s payment system falling into place, Müller believes Centi has “a very good chance of becoming a billion-dollar company.”

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Liar, liar, banks on fire

By Press Release | 16 March 2023

Venture capital’s desperate pursuit of a government bailout of tech-focused Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) not only exposed the lies behind VC’s libertarian pose, it offered lessons on how they conned the public into believing the neutered BTC protocol was Bitcoin.

SVB’s recent near-death experience sent a shiver down the spine of many a tech exec, that is, until the federal government stepped in with their don’t-call-it-a-bailout-bailout. Employees of tech start-ups will continue to be paid after the feds agreed to guarantee all SVB deposits, even those above the FDIC’s $250,000 insured maximum.

SVB’s major crime was seriously misjudging the Federal Reserve’s willingness to raise interest rates. SVB plowed a bunch of capital into long-term bonds that lost value as interest rates spiked. When too many of SVB’s tech-focused customers began dipping into their savings, the bank was forced to redeem these bonds at a loss, leaving a nearly $2 billion hole in its balance sheet.

But SVB also relied far too heavily on a single business sector, with predictable results. Many of its tech clients were equally at fault for putting too much of their capital – in some cases, all of their capital – into a single financial institution.

Some VCs reportedly pressed their portfolio companies to bank exclusively with SVB, apparently because that made the companies more likely to qualify for SVB loans, thereby alleviating the need for the VCs to pony up additional cash themselves.

Prior to Sunday’s bailout news, panic-stricken pleas were issued on social media by prominent VCs, all of whom had apparently undergone a 180-degree conversion from staunch Randian objectivists to enthusiastic Keynesian interventionists. The minute they feared their funds were in danger, these rugged individualists began crying for their federal mommies to save them.

Perhaps the most galling element of this campaign was the VCs’ apocalyptic warnings that failing to make them whole would cause SVB’s woes to spread to other banks. It wasn’t for their sake that a bailout had to happen, but to protect society. Without immediate intervention, America would resemble something out of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (minus the mitigating presence of Charlize Theron).

They calmed down once the grown-ups reassured them that the monsters under the bed were all gone. But while these VCs might now claim they were never, like, really worried, their ‘get government off our backs and let us innovate’ schtick won’t play anymore. As countless others have observed over the past week, there are no atheists in a foxhole and even fewer libertarians in a bank run. And the feds definitely aren’t helping by turning moral hazards into mulligans.

Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?

Before the feds stepped in, many VCs had signed a joint statement of support for SVB, claiming that if the bank were “purchased and appropriately capitalized, we would be strongly supportive and encourage our portfolio companies to resume their banking relationship with them.”

Notably absent from the hundreds of VC names appearing on this statement were prominent crypto investors a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), Paradigm and Pantera Capital. Presumably, they were among the lucky few who managed to get their cash out of SVB before the doors were locked.

Also absent was Founders Fund, whose partner Peter Thiel reportedly helped spark the single-day $42 billion bank run that brought SVB to its knees. Founders Fund withdrew the entirety of its deposits from SVB before it shut and urged its portfolio companies to do likewise. Since then, neither Thiel nor Founders has spoken publicly about SVB.

But Thiel’s escape – and his pulling up the drawbridge behind him – didn’t go unnoticed. G Squared founder Larry Aschebrook called it “truly unfortunate that several GPs and companies are making a tough situation for SVB worse by pressing the panic button. SVB has supported entrepreneurs and GPs at all stages of their businesses and that partnership should run both ways.”

Following SVB’s collapse, Upfront Ventures’ Mark Suster expressed annoyance at certain VCs who were “telling people to run for the door and congratulating themselves for it … I’m seeing emails from VCs to their [limited partners] – of which I am in some firms – and they are forwarding these things like ‘Aren’t I super smart?’”

You get the heroes you deserve

Unlike the faux libertarian VCs who got out their begging bowls, Thiel’s actions are the epitome of Randian self-interest. That Thiel would act to preserve his own interests at others’ expense isn’t illegal. It’s arguably not even unethical. But his selfish actions did shift the worst-case scenario from theoretical possibility to guaranteed outcome.

Not that Thiel’s ethics weren’t already suspect. As detailed in Max Chafkin’s book, Thiel’s early stint as PayPal CEO included him urging the board of directors to turn over the company’s cash so that he could invest it with his Thiel Capital hedge fund. The board reportedly viewed this as evidence of Thiel’s ‘lack of a moral compass.’

Thiel’s PayPal tenure also demonstrated a willingness – if not eagerness – to ignore ‘know your customer’ regulations in order to rapidly grow the company. Thiel called his more compliant competitors “insane” for following the rules. In other words, Thiel was a perfect match for crypto.

Thiel’s crypto involvement has focused primarily on BTC, although the Founders Fund portfolio includes crypto-friendly payment processor Stripe and Paxos, which until recently issued the BUSD stablecoin. Thiel is also a founder of Valar Ventures, whose portfolio included the crypto exchanges Bitpanda and (now bankrupt) Vauld, as well as the XanPool fiat-crypto gateway.

In January, the Financial Post revealed that Founders Fund netted $1.8 billion after selling its BTC holdings in March 2022. Just one week after that sale, Thiel gave a speech at a BTC conference in Miami in which he held up several hundred-dollar bills, declaring them to be “probably not very good as toilet paper. It’s not good as wallpaper. It’s sort of this crappy fiat money.” He then tossed the bills into the audience and openly mocked those who scrambled to pick them up.

Thiel justified his stunt by declaring that BTC “is telling us that the central banks are bankrupt, that we are at the end of the fiat money regime.” Thiel neglected to inform the audience that he’d recently traded his massive BTC holdings for that archaic, crappy fiat money.

Why the subterfuge? Perhaps Thiel is just a fame whore and can’t live without occasionally basking in the adulation of a room full of sycophants who haven’t yet realized that he thinks they’re rubes. Thiel also might have been aware of the furious tongue-lashing his former PayPal partner Elon Musk received in absentia at the 2021 conference from Max Keiser, who repeatedly yelled ‘Fuck Elon!’ after Musk’s own massive BTC sell-off was revealed.

Thiel would also have been all too aware that fiat money might be crappy but BTC will never be money, because BTC in no way resembles the vision of peer-to-peer electronic cash described in Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 Bitcoin white paper. BTC transactions simply cost too much for it ever to serve as a currency. What’s more, its transaction capacity is so constrained, BTC could change to a ‘proof of carrier pigeon’ consensus mechanism and few would notice.

Thiel’s Miami speech declared that BTC “is a movement, and it’s a political question whether this movement is going to succeed, or whether the enemies of the movement will succeed in stopping us.” That is, unless the enemies are already inside the castle walls and secretly sniggering at the peasants still lining up to trade their filthy fiat for magic BTC beans.

Just like yesterday

A long time ago, Bitcoin was electronic cash, until some greedy grifter types realized there was an opportunity to fence in the financial commons that Satoshi had gifted the world. The BTC Core developers did the rest, kneecapping Bitcoin in order to force transactions off Layer 1 and onto proprietary sidechains.

The Frankenstein’s monster that emerged – forget ‘digital gold,’ it’s a digital gelding – became known as BTC. Many of the same opportunistic swindlers cited above would have you believe that BTC is Bitcoin. Don’t buy their bullshit. They were lying then and they’re lying now.

I’m dating myself here, but The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again was part of the soundtrack of my youth. The line about how “the morals that they worship will be gone” kept popping in my head as the SVB debacle played out. Just like the Core developers’ enforced dogma that ‘BTC = Bitcoin’ always brings to mind the line “they decide and the shotgun sings the song.”

Me? I’ll get on my knees and pray that we don’t get fooled again. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. BSV is Bitcoin.

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ROW8 acquires Rad to power its premium movies streaming service with NFTs

By Press Release | 22 December 2022

This article was originally published on CoinGeek on December 22, 2022.

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 21, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — ROW8, the Premium Movie Streaming service with the latest Hollywood films like Black Adam with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Ticket to Paradise with George Clooney, and Bullet Train with Brad Pitt, has acquired the metaverse and web3 streaming platform Rad. ROW8 has premium video on demand movies from every major studio on its platform, with all of its studio partners exploring NFTs in some way. Rad has been building immersive streaming technology and leveraging smart contracts for over 5 years, and has many of the same studio partners for VR and blockchain-based content. Combined, the two companies will work with major studios and the top NFT projects building for web3 and the metaverse.

“Rad’s suite of web3 creator tools alongside ROW8’s library of Hollywood films will make our platform the premier destination for both digital collectibles and your favorite movies” said Jasmina Christoph, Founder and President at ROW8.

“ROW8 is easily the best positioned company in the world to bring Hollywood into the future, with its patented technology, app footprint, and deep relationships with the biggest studios in the world”, said Tony Mugavero, CEO of Rad. “They have the highest level pipeline of content you can have in the entertainment industry, and Rad works with the same studios in web3 and XR, which means we can accelerate adoption of forward-thinking distribution from a place of trust.”

ROW8 has streaming deals in place with every major movie studio, including Disney, Universal, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and it offers over 1800 theatrical release-windowed movies. ROW8’s patented technology includes the ability to geo-locate viewers and share revenue with nearby theater chains, dynamic “Scene Alerts” to give viewers a peek into seeing if the next scene is scary or has adult themes, and their proprietary “Movie Love Guarantee” which allows viewers to return a movie and swap it for another one if they weren’t enjoying it.

Rad has streamed innovative content with every major studio and broadcaster globally by licensing content or powering experiences in VR and web3, and has streaming apps on PlayStation 4 and 5, Android TV, iOS, and Meta Quest, and built a globally leading position in VR, distributing content to devices like PlayStation VR, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality. Rad was the first streaming service to offer an NFT subscription and is launching its full NFT Stream Pass in December 2022. Rad has done NFT releases with companies like DKNY, Hacksmith, Cinedigm, and directly with creators like Elliot Sloan and platinum rapper Calboy. Rad also worked with ConsenSys to build its cross-blockchain-based platform Ara with the ARA token, which will power ROW8’s NFT platform. Additionally, Rad has numerous studio and well known media investors like Disney, Sony Innovation Fund, A+E Networks, WWE, Warner Music Group, Gary Vaynerchuk, and more.

Tony Mugavero will become CEO of the combined companies, and Rad’s leadership team will all stay as part of the transaction.

“We couldn’t be more excited to join forces with ROW8,” said Brooklyn Earick, Chief Marketing Officer at Rad, who will be staying on as Chief Strategy Officer post-acquisition. “Combined, we’ll be the first platform to offer movies like Avatar and Top Gun alongside NFT’s from Hollywood studios and web3 creatives.”

The combined companies have secured funding in a round led by Ayre Group.

Ayre Group founder Calvin Ayre celebrated the acquisition, calling it “the perfect marriage of content and delivery, the intersection of preparation and opportunity. ROW8’s vast library of marquee content will discover new ways to reach consumers through Rad’s BSV-based NFTs. BSV is the only blockchain with the scaling capacity and ultra-low transaction fees to realize the promise that web3 holds for creators, distributors and consumers.”

Also participating in the round are Intersect VC, who are investors in Dapper Labs and Triller; former New England Patriot Super Bowl Champion and Pro Bowler Richard Seymour’s 93 Ventures; Alvin Kwan, former head of Corporate Development at Fox and Board Member at Fubo TV; Rusty Matveev, who is CSO at Calaxy and formerly a partner at MSG Ventures; Revere VC; Stacks; and Jason Campbell, former quarterback for the Washington Redskins and Oakland Raiders.

Upon completion of the acquisition, Paul Rajchgod, Managing Director, Private Equity for Ayre Group, will be appointed to ROW8’s board.

About Rad

Rad NFTV is the first streaming platform powered by NFTs. Rad’s suite of apps allows you to stream Live TV, Premium Video, and Live Events all unlocked through NFTs. Discover content in ESports, Music, Comedy, and Sports Entertainment from companies like Complex, Whistle, CoinDesk, DeadHeads, Knights of Degen, and Virtue Animation Studio. Rad NFTV’s library of fast and loud content, NFTs, crypto rewards, and OTT footprint creates a streaming metaverse for the next generation of creators and fans.

The platform can deliver a broad range of NFT and content experiences, with 2D, 3D, 4K, Live, 360° / 180° VR, and traditional video across devices like PlayStation 5, PSVR, Oculus Quest, iOS, Google TV, and more. Viewers can earn ARA rewards and become peers in the network powered by Ara’s blockchain and P2P networking technology, and the company’s Rad Pandas can be used to unlock lifetime subscriptions as well as get additional ARA rewards.

About ROW8

ROW8 is a subscription-free movie only OTT service featuring both new and catalog titles and has distribution deals with all major Hollywood studios. It also features its proprietary “Movie Love Guarantee” allowing customers to return their film within the first 30 minutes and exchange it for another without any additional fees, and its patent pending “Scene Alert” monitoring system which alerts parents to inappropriate scenes before they air, giving them control over what content their children see.

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Vaionex closes major investment round with Ayre Group

By Press Release | 13 June 2022

This article was originally published on CoinGeek on June 13, 2022.

Antigua, June 13 2022: Vaionex Corporation, the Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) company that has become a crucial part of the BitcoinSV (BSV) ecosystem, has closed a significant investment round of $1.23M USD with Ayre Group, marking its largest funding round to date.

CEO and co-founder, Robin Kohze, described Vaionex as a group of blockchain companies focused on core infrastructure (Relysia), on-chain database storage and management (Metashard), smart contracts (Transpiler), tokenization (STAS), and non-fungible tokens (NFTech). Vaionex aims to reduce BSV development time by as much as 95%, while eliminating the friction that prevents companies from embracing blockchain technology on their own.

Kohze, a genetics department PhD student at the University of Cambridge, started Vaionex after co-founding the Cambridge Metanet Society in 2019. Metanet Society events and debates led to the launch of Satolearn, a platform that teaches users how to program blockchain-based applications which is now part of the FinTech MSc program at the University of Exeter. To date, Satolearn has educated over 1,500 graduates and has become a major learning source for BSV ecosystem companies.

Kohze commented on the investment: “Essential societal shifts towards digitally driven decision-making created the need for verifiable data sources and their management. Immutable blockchain components will soon transform the ability and reliability of data-driven platforms of nearly any vertical in the world. While it is no easy feat to stand at the forefront of blockchain transformation, we focused on the base needs of our growing list of enterprise partners in that process. Ayre Group joins Vaionex at a strategic point in time to significantly upscale our operations in the endeavor to build out seamless blockchain services.”

The heart of Vaionex’s operations is Relysia, a BaaS development suite with over 60 Application Programming Interface (API) points that cover almost any blockchain application. Relysia integrates all aspects of wallet creation, issuing tokens, smart contracts, uploads, and addresses, cutting development time while ensuring application reliability.

At the recent BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai, Vaionex unveiled several new initiatives, including Transpiler (working with California-based sCrypt Inc.); a ‘wormhole to efficiency’ that enables developers to easily convert Ethereum-based smart contracts, NFTs and tokens into BSV scripts, thereby taking advantage of the 99.99% reduced transaction fees available on the BSV blockchain.

Ayre Group’s founder Calvin Ayre celebrated his group’s investment in Vaionex: “I’m thrilled to support Vaionex, which has established itself as a core company involved in BSV development. Vaionex has created a funnel that brings developers and non-developers alike into the BSV ecosystem, identifying major pain points and simplifying them for both entrepreneurs looking to build new businesses as well as existing companies looking to incorporate blockchain benefits into their operations.”

About Vaionex

Vaionex Corporation was co-founded by Robin Kohze and Dr. Samuel Schmidt to transform blockchain adoption across the globe. In the two years since its foundation, Vaionex has acquired strategic equity in a variety of companies to build an ecosystem of rapid blockchain service adoption and offers software consultancy to major enterprise partners in the BitcoinSV ecosystem.

About Ayre Group

Ayre Group, founded by celebrated entrepreneur and philanthropist Calvin Ayre, provides capital to scalable, high-growth businesses within the BSV blockchain ecosystem, the only infinitely scaling enterprise public blockchain. The Group targets investment in innovative ideas and ambitious projects that are ‘positively disruptive’, supporting their expansion with the Group’s extensive network and industry partners.

Lightning Sharks on behalf of Ayre Group

Key contact: Haris Khan
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +44 (0) 7503 581 563

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CoinGeek TV: Calvin Ayre talks BSV growth over the years and the future it holds

By Press Release | 05 June 2022

This article was originally published on CoinGeek on July 5, 2022.

Calvin Ayre joined Kurt Wuckert Jr. on CoinGeek TV to discuss why he is still fighting for Satoshi’s vision despite the opposition and what he believes the future holds for Bitcoin SV.

Ayre is the founder of Ayre Group, a global investment group through which he has invested in many of today’s biggest Bitcoin ecosystem’s success stories. He is also the founder of CoinGeek. He joined Wuckert on Day 2 of the BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai, which incidentally was also his birthday.

As Wuckert noted, the Dubai event is the biggest by far, attracting the highest number of attendees and online streamers. “I can feel the energy building,” Ayre stated while announcing that the next event will be in London, and he expects that to be even bigger.

“The difference with what’s going on here compared to when we started the conference series in 2018 is that right now people are talking about their products with actual performance metrics. Before, it was theoretical,” he said.

Calvin Ayre on CG TV Dubai with Kurt Wuckert Jr.

The event was the first in Dubai, a city that’s gained global recognition for its blockchain adoption and integration. Ayre believes that this recognition is deserved as Dubai has a government that’s always willing to invest in and experiment with new and emerging technologies. Dubai, and the wider United Arab Emirates, have especially embraced BSV blockchain because the focus is on utility and not hype.

Ayre has been in Bitcoin for several years now and he says the journey has been “frustrating in a good way.” He would want to see things move much faster, but he appreciates the Bitcoin ecosystem’s growth over the years.

On why his tune never changes regarding Bitcoin, the gambling industry pioneer told Wuckert that it’s “because no other product can do what this technology does…if you’re really trying to solve enterprise-size data problems, you’ve got no other choice. This is the only game in town.”

Bitcoin SV is technically superior to any other blockchain network in the market by a wide margin, the other blockchain networks are called hobby platforms. And since the detractors couldn’t fault BSV on technical or application grounds, they have focused on attacking the personalities, with Dr. Craig Wright being the prime target. However, he has an impressive record in court case, and this is positively impacting BSV.

“That’s helping change the narrative around this product because that cloud of misinformation targeted at the technology by attacking the person is lifting,” he said.

Calvin Ayre on CG TV Dubai

However, even more importantly, more and more people building on BSV are proving that ‘the technology works as advertised.’

BSV is an enterprise blockchain, and with this, it has attracted several companies handling enterprise-level data. This ranges from those solving supply chain and social media challenges to games that process millions of transactions a day. And as the ecosystem grows, there will be more synergy between different players with shared tools that make developing an application on Bitcoin SV way easier than it is today, Ayre noted.

This growth will continue and even accelerate in the coming years. Ayre expects BSV to attract more and more companies each year, telling Wuckert that while what BSV has achieved is quite notable, it’s quite a small ecosystem compared to the size of the industries we’re trying to revolutionize.

One of the biggest factors for growth in the coming years is targeting regions other than North America. As Ayre noted, most of the people threatened by Bitcoin’s unbounded scaling are based in the United States, and as such, BSV gets much better reception in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

In closing, Ayre has this piece of advice to everyone: Take your time and do your own research on what Bitcoin is capable of.

Watch the BSV Global Blockchain Convention Dubai 2022 Day 1 here:

Watch the BSV Global Blockchain Convention Dubai 2022 Day 2 here:

Watch the BSV Global Blockchain Convention Dubai 2022 Day 3 here:

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Rad looks to BSV as ‘source of truth’ across NFT ecosystem

By Press Release | 29 March 2022

This article was originally published on CoinGeek on March 29, 2022.

Ayre Group, the Ayre Group’s venture capital division, has announced a significant investment in Rad NFTV, the innovative content distribution and NFT streaming platform that is looking to BSV for help in managing the increasingly complex NFT/Web3 ecosystem.

Rad began life midway through the last decade under the name Littlstar, a streaming network with a focus on virtual reality (VR) video content. Littlstar was a launch partner on all the major VR devices and headsets, including PlayStation VR, Oculus and Google Daydream. Littlstar also had content deals with major film and TV studios, including Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and Viacom.

While Littlstar was able to build trust on the content side with these companies as well as a respectable customer base via its consumer-facing app, Rad CEO Tony Mugavero told CoinGeek that the VR content produced by the studios at the time was largely exploratory, and the companies began scaling back or shutting down their VR operations around the end of 2017.

With VR not yet ready for prime time, Rad began supporting traditional video content, which offered access to a broader range of devices beyond VR headsets. Rad inked a raft of partnerships that saw its app appear on PlayStation 5, Android TV and Apple devices. More recently, Rad struck a deal with Chinese tech giant Huawei that will see its app pre-installed on a couple hundred million TVs.

However, the shift to traditional video streaming meant Rad was now in competition with mainstream giants such as Netflix and Hulu, leaving the company searching for an answer to why consumers should choose their service. Having been an early adopter of Bitcoin and other major digital assets, Mugavero began studying the potential advantages that blockchain technology could offer.

Ahead of the curve

In 2017, Mugavero wrote a white paper based on his view that content should be using smart contracts to handle revenue shares/resales and should be loosely coupled to a content delivery network.

The platform that emerged was powered by Ara, a P2P ecosystem with built-in commerce and content delivery layers. It allowed network peers to host and deliver content, creators to sell content through the network and consumers to purchase content. Peers were rewarded with an Ethereum-based token called ARA, while those who were either pushing content in or pulling it out were interacting with blockchain tech to prove ownership.

But once again, Rad found itself ahead of the curve. Major content providers were happy to take meetings with Rad to discuss this promising new technology, but these meetings always ended with expressions of enthusiasm for the future possibilities without any concrete plans for the here and now.

Things changed dramatically around the end of 2020 as interest in the NFT space exploded thanks to NBA Topshot. That led consumers to the OpenSea marketplace, which enjoyed exponential volume growth from one month to the next. Seizing the moment, Rad announced plans for its own NFT marketplace in 2021.

No ice bucket challenge videos

Rad’s initial forays into the NFT world saw it launch some auctions directly on its platform, mainly comprised of a few “higher touch” efforts with fashion outfit DKNY and streaming giant Cinedigm that Mugavero said allowed Rad to “get a handle on what’s working and what’s not.”

Brooklyn Earick, CMO at Rad NFTV, didn’t see pitching its services to the hordes of individuals creating vacation videos or TikTok dances. Instead, Rad focused on “the premium end of YouTube,” aka the creators of animated series, short films and the like.

In stark contrast to the prevailing model that requires creators to engage with as many as five or six different services to launch an NFT initiative, the Rad platform’s tools offer creators everything they need to create/distribute/market their own NFTs without needing to talk directly to Rad. Earick says this one-stop-shop concept “has been resonating really well with the NFT natives as well as our existing content partners who are now saying ‘how do we get into this.’”

Rad’s team has a number of members who are well familiar with Ethereum, and Earick said that chain was “the tip of the spear to build for.” However, Earick noted that “it’s very expensive to build [on Ethereum] from a gas perspective.” (Ethereum’s inherent volatility was on full display last Friday as gas prices soared with the launch of the NFT-affiliated APE token.)

The hurdles imposed by Ethereum’s unpredictable transaction fees were among the factors that led the Rad team to investigate BSV’s potential role in Rad’s operations. Earick said BSV’s clear advantages in terms of cost and scale were “obviously very interesting” because “if you present consumers with options, they’ll largely gravitate towards the one that creates the least friction, makes their lives easier and costs less.”

BSV holds the same appeal for creators who face the costs of minting hundreds or even thousands of individual NFTs to launch their own collection. “If they have the option of doing so at x price and 100x price, they’ll naturally gravitate toward the cheaper option.”

The BSV blockchain’s commitment to large blocks also allows creators to include a greater amount of NFT metadata on-chain. While BSV’s capacity has yet to scale to the point where it makes sense to upload Blue Ray-quality copies of every film in a studio’s library, creators can include cast information, subtitles and other metadata that add value to individual NFTs.

The master plan? A master ledger

Mugavero is even more intrigued by what BSV can offer a company’s back office operations, including distributing files that require a chain of custody. Mugavero cited the example of film editors submitting changes for review, which may involve multiple individuals in multiple departments. BSV can be used for entitlements inside an organization with the ability to track an asset’s progress, an option that Mugavero said a number of studios have expressed interest in exploring.

However, this interest would quickly cool if the studios faced paying excessive ETH gas fees every time an asset is transferred within a large organization. “If it’s pennies, it’s not a big deal. If it’s $100 every single time they move around ownership, that’s a problem.”

Mugavero also sees great potential in using BSV to enable “highly complex payout setups like royalty payments.” A movie or music project may involve hundreds of individuals, each of whom performed different roles with different compensation structures. A complex smart contract would be required to manage all those payouts each time an asset is sold and certain benchmarks are reached, which again only makes sense if the chain on which that contract operates has a low-fee structure of the type offered by BSV.

Currently, if you wanted to understand all NFT activity across all chains, you’d need to write bots to scrape data from each individual chain, then somehow cobble those separate files into a single database. Mugavero says Rad plans to use BSV as “an aggregator of all cross-chain data, so if someone mints something on Ethereum or Solana or wherever, Rad can in parallel fire off an entry into BSV, so it becomes a master ledger.”

Mugavero says “there’s an interesting opportunity there as a source of truth across the ecosystem. That could potentially be done on various different chains but that’s where the low cost and potential larger amounts of metadata capabilities come in on the BSV side.”

Mugavero says BSV’s ability to manage “the guts of the business” will have strong appeal for entities looking to bring a greater sense of order to the burgeoning NFT sector. Rad is already building on BSV and will soon be minting NFTs on Testnet, and Mugavero expects to have a cross-chain single ledger of transactions in place within 12 months.

Like many pioneering technology outfits, Rad has long been ahead of the curve, waiting for the rest of the world to catch on to what it already knows. At long last, with a little boost from BSV, Rad is poised to reap the benefits of being in the right place at the right time.

Watch: CoinGeek New York panel, The New World of NFTs

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