Vaionex closes major investment round with Ayre Ventures
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 Ventures, 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 Ventures 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 Ventures’ 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 Ventures
Ayre Ventures, 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.
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 Ventures, 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.
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.
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:
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 Ventures, 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
Rad announces new funding from Ayre Ventures; plans to build cross-blockchain NFT management platform on the BSV Blockchain
By Press Release | 21 March 2022
This article was originally published on CoinGeek on March 21, 2022.
Rad, the innovative content distribution and NFT streaming platform, has secured significant funding in a round led by Ayre Ventures; 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; and Jason Campbell, former quarterback for the Washington Redskins and Oakland Raiders.
Rad recently launched NFTV, redefining video streaming by combining major content creators and studios with future foundational technologies like web3, blockchain, and virtual and augmented reality (XR). It’s the first network to make NFTs accessible via a rapidly expanding network of over 500m devices worldwide – including Sony PlayStations 4 & 5, Android TVs and Apple platforms. Rad currently offers an unprecedented range of Gen Z-focused entertainment spanning gaming, music, on-demand video, live events, and sports. Rad has done content deals with the likes of Disney, NBCUniversal, Fox, Showtime, Warner Brothers, Sony, Complex Magazine, Whistle Sports, Cinedigm, Esports TV, Anthem Sports & Entertainment, and hundreds of others, and is trusted by the biggest content and hardware companies in the world.
Rad’s streaming platform is powered by Ara, which is a P2P ecosystem for content creators that uses an Ethereum-based token (ARA) for governance, incentives, and staking with royalties for NFTs sold through their platform. The platform is built to incorporate numerous chains and will make discoverability of content and NFTs across chains more efficient and approachable to creators and consumers alike. Rad’s integration of the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain will include support for BSV-based NFTs with on-chain storage of large NFT files including full-length movies, video holograms and AR/VR content. Rad will also leverage the BSV blockchain’s low-cost and high-scaling capacity for managing and tracking NFTs across multiple chains.
Ayre Ventures joins existing investors The Tornante Company which is Michael Eisner’s fund, Sony Innovation Fund, A+E Networks, WWE, Warner Music Group, and Disney via the Disney Accelerator.
Commenting on the funding round, Rad CEO Tony Mugavero said:
“Rad couldn’t be more excited to partner with Ayre Ventures and support the BSV ecosystem. Consumers buying, and creators making movies, XR, and clips leveraging blockchain-based technologies need low cost and high throughput transactions that compliment high performance streaming,” said Tony Mugavero, CEO of Rad. “Blockchain technology should be largely transparent to consumers and creators, and they’ll always go for the most cost-effective and performant option, which the BSV blockchain solves for.”
Rad CMO Brooklyn Earick added:
“We are pumped to offer our users a fast and inexpensive option to scale at enterprise levels on Rad. We foresee a future where creators can tokenize everything, digital and IRL, to fund content creation, art collections and more. BSV will allow our users to both think long-term and execute quickly without the worry of what gas fees might be that day.”
Ayre Ventures founder Calvin Ayre commented on his group’s $1.5m investment in Rad, saying:
“BSV is the perfect home for future-focused companies like Rad that have outgrown the constraints imposed by other public blockchains. I’m thrilled to partner with Rad as they push the boundaries of what a streaming platform has to offer and meet the public’s insatiable demand for an ever-widening variety of digital entertainment options.”
Rad previously secured investment from a number of prominent entities, including A&E Ventures, Sony Corporation of America, Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., Warner Music Inc., and World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. Rad’s media partners include Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS and Warner Music.
About Rad
Rad is redefining streaming for the modern era with NFTs, on-demand, live events, and TV featuring the biggest content creators and studios in the world; all powered by future foundational technologies like blockchain and XR. Discover the best in Music, Movies & TV, Comedy, Sports, Gaming and more! Rad supports on demand, live, holograms, 180°, 360°, 3D content and NFT collectibles (non-fungible tokens). Watch thousands of hours of content, join watch parties, buy limited edition NFTs, get XR experiences, and collect crypto rewards.
Discover more at rad.live and download our iOS app, Android TV app, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, or PSVR apps.
About Ayre Ventures
Ayre Ventures, 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.
Blockchain-as-a-service provider mintBlue, closes substantial seed round financing of EURO 2M
By Press Release | 10 March 2022
This article was originally published on CoinGeek on March 10, 2022.
Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform provider mintBlue has secured €2 million in a round led by Two Hop Ventures, with additional support from a Dutch angel investor and Ayre Ventures.
mintBlue is the go-to platform for developers to build with blockchain. mintBlue offers a proprietary API that allows companies large and small to migrate data to the public blockchain, thereby increasing data security, interoperability and traceability. As the leading blockchain development suite that provides data storage directly on the blockchain, mintBlue aims to become the ‘decentralized AWS.’
mintBlue’s solutions are non-custodial; this means that end users control their data and have no lock-in issues. The software supports a commercial level scale that allows for monetisation opportunities down to a thousandth of a cent.
mintBlue’s software allows a growing list of companies to focus on their core operations without the need to devote time and resources to understanding complex blockchain infrastructure. Learn more about mintBlue’s product offering – including NFT invoicing, data integrity and document verification – at mintblue.com.
mintBlue was recently selected by VISMA | yuki, a leading European cloud accounting solutions provider, to integrate blockchain-based functionalities into its bookkeeping. mintBlue has already handled over 700,000 NFT invoices for VISMA | yuki at an extremely low cost per invoice, improving efficiency while eliminating vectors for financial malpractice.
The Dutch angel investor backing mintBlue commented:
Blockchain technology is fascinating, and the mintBlue team has managed to develop one of the world’s first real-world use-cases for a public blockchain with VISMA, with more to come.
Commenting on the investment round, mintBlue CEO Niels van den Bergh said:
With this investment, mintBlue will start its trajectory to become the de-facto blockchain infrastructure provider for web3. Platforms will lose market share over protocols, and we will be there to support that change.
Two Hop Ventures general partner Alex Fauvel said:
mintBlue is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced teams in the blockchain industry, and Two Hop Ventures is proud to support them in their first funding round. With large partners and customers experimenting with putting and managing data on-chain, it is only a matter of time until traditional and modern enterprises are using mintBlue for all their blockchain integrations.
Ayre Ventures founder Calvin Ayre added:
“BitcoinSV (BSV) is the only public enterprise blockchain to offer unbounded scaling, and mintBlue exemplifies BSV’s unique capacity to handle large transaction volumes at a minimal cost. I look at mintBlue as Europe’s answer to Alchemy, the U.S. blockchain developer platform that recently raised $200m at a $10b valuation. As word spreads of mintBlue’s capacity to boost business via the BSV blockchain, I see mintBlue mirroring Alchemy’s meteoric rise.”
ABOUT MINTBLUE
mintBlue makes blockchain development easy. Users can focus on their solution instead of the complex underlying blockchain infrastructure. We offer data solutions to store, share and monetise data without giving up ownership.
mintBlue is Europe’s first public blockchain platform used at scale.
Two Hop Ventures is a venture capital fund focused exclusively on start-ups building infrastructure for the next generation of the Internet. The infrastructure behind this leap forward allows data and other assets to be held by the users, not Facebook, Google etc., via the combination of the blockchain and Internet. Two Hop believes that the Bitcoin SV Blockchain is the only viable solution.
The fund has a traditional structure, is registered at the AFM in The Netherlands and operates under the EU AIFMD light regime. It holds no BSV or other crypto and is strictly equity and debt only. Investments are made exclusively in early-stage start-ups building on the Bitcoin SV blockchain and are without geographic limitation. The manager seeks to maximize investor returns by creating a balanced portfolio across the core infrastructure sectors of this flourishing ecosystem.
ABOUT AYRE VENTURES
Ayre Ventures, 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.
Ayre Ventures joins Satoshi Block Dojo’s growing database of investors and VCs
By Press Release | 24 February 2022
This article was originally published on CoinGeek on February 24, 2022.
Ayre Ventures has made a significant investment in technology startup incubator Satoshi Block Dojo (SBD), offering additional opportunities for BSV-focused entrepreneurs to turn their visions into reality.
This week, Ayre Ventures announced that it had made a significant investment in the London-based Satoshi Block Dojo, which operates an intensive 12-week in-house training program for BSV-focused startups that offers these fledgling projects much more than simply desk space and the occasional word of encouragement.
Launched in August 2021, the Dojo announced its mission as taking responsibility for the more mundane and financially draining aspects of starting a company in order to let founders focus on the development of their idea into a tangible and truly viable product.
Following an application and vetting process, each of the Dojo’s first ‘cohort’ of startups entered the Dojo offices in East London on January 15 with a £10,000 ‘golden hello.’ Over the next 12 weeks, these teams—minimum two-person groups, ideally consisting of one commercial/CEO and one technical/CTO, although Dojo can help find technical talent—will enjoy a weekly rhythm of workshops, masterclasses, 1-2-1’s and socials, but the assistance on offer will also have an external component.
Getting corporates involved early
Dojo co-founder Craig Massey said his company was “trying to be more proactive by getting corporates involved right from the start.” Massey, a startup veteran with five successful exits to his credit, said the lesson he took from his failures was “not getting a potential client involved soon enough in the process of building the technology.”
As such, Dojo aims to connect its cohort teams with R&D partners early on. Once these partners are on board, “they can feedback, advise, iterate. It stands to reason that you might end up with a letter of intent or at least some validation that it’s actually going to be a more viable product as opposed to ‘build it and they will come.’”
Potential R&D partners will be able to study the cohort teams through the new Dojo Discover platform, which is scheduled to launch by the end of Q1. Cohort participants will also be able to update potential investors as to their progress throughout the 12-week program and afterwards (in theory up to their Series A funding and beyond). Investors interested in gaining early access to the Dojo Discover platform can sign up here.
At the conclusion of the first cohort on April 7, the individual teams will take part in Demo Day, aka the investor pitch event, with £140,000 in Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) funding potentially awaiting each team. Dojo principals will help cohort teams prep for their moment in the spotlight.
Get to know the cohort
Massey and Dojo CIO James Marchant—who also has a history of successful business exits—believe several of the current cohort are strong contenders to finish strong on Demo Day. Marchant singled out two—Buzzmint and Soundoshi—as his choice for the first teams to score significant investor interest.
Buzzmint is a platform that will allow brands, creators, media-specific businesses and individuals to simply and quickly ideate, create and deploy utility-led NFT/token projects. Customers can integrate their own branded version of the Buzzmint platform into their websites or publish directly to Buzzmint’s own marketplace, which is set to debut in Q3.
Soundoshi—formerly known as Banach Group—is described by its Polish founders as an ownership-based streaming platform, using NFTs as a new music carrier/container. Users can not only own the music but also send, trade or exchange it. The platform, which expects to launch in Q2/Q3, is currently in talks with key Polish music publishers about onboarding their catalogues.
Massey’s top cohort picks include Sattva Meta, who are building a platform to help construction companies reduce their carbon impact and achieve net zero emissions by 2050. There’s also pay-for-play game Ninja Punk Girls and a call-to-earn app called +App, which Massey touted as ideal for professionals who charge by the minute for their services, including lawyers, counsellors and therapists.
BSV investor appetite growing
Ayre Ventures founder Calvin Ayre is a noted BSV proponent and his Ayre Group has made a number of investments in BSV-based projects. As such, his interest in supporting Satoshi Block Dojo—and the multiple successful projects that will likely emerge from its cohorts—seems a no-brainer.
But Ayre’s willingness to back up his vocal support for BSV with generous financial support has led critics to claim that the BSV ecosystem couldn’t survive without him. Massey and Marchant’s history of successful exits have left them with a vastly different view of the field.
The Dojo has a database of over 3,500 angel investors, 250 family offices and early-stage VCs on which they can draw for potential cohort partners. Massey believes Ayre Ventures invested in the Dojo “because it makes a lot of sense but the Dojo is also bringing in lots of new money into the BSV arena.” Ayre Ventures’ willingness to take the lead on this current funding round will “provide confidence to other investors, who are totally outside of the blockchain space, to make significant investments into the Dojo.”
Marchant echoed this view, saying that “as more startups choose to use BSV both inside and outside the Dojo, there is significant growing interest and demand for investment opportunities into attractive business models that are utilising this scalable tech. I would go so far as to say investor appetite outweighs early-stage BSV investment opportunities and this is a problem where the Dojo is aiming to have an impact.”
The future is about scalability
As befitting a company based on accelerating project development, the Dojo is expanding its operations internationally to create a constant flow of new BSV startups and investment opportunities. Marchant said the plan is to open the first international Dojo within the next six to nine months and then add two new locations per year onwards.
The specific locations have yet to be finalized but Marchant said Dojo was weighing options in the Middle East, Central Europe and the United States. Each of these new locations will require an initial round of investment but, as with its original U.K. Dojo, investors will also receive equity in each startup that comes through a specific location. Interested parties are invited to contact Marchant at [email protected].
In the meantime, the Dojo’s London offices will welcome their second cohort about a month after the first bunch ‘graduates’. Entrepreneurs interested in being part of the Dojo’s second cohort need to submit their applications by March 31, with successful applicants scheduled to begin their Dojo experience on April 30. Subsequent cohorts will follow this rough pattern of three months on, one month off.
The Dojo is also hosting its first Ideation Jam on March 23, 2022, in partnership with the UCL Business School. The event will take place in the Lloyds building in London and is appropriately aimed at the insurance industry. Twenty teams of three students apiece will listen as insurance executives cite specific issues/areas in which blockchain tech might offer solutions. A pitch day will follow in which the student teams will present their ideas to a panel of Dojo judges, with the top three teams gaining automatic entry into the Dojo.
Massey said the Dojo has a ‘no one gets left behind’ mantra and this philosophy has trickled down to the current cohort participants. “I have witnessed extraordinary help and collaboration between all the different companies who genuinely, become each other’s business associates.” This spirit of cooperation, combined with the connections made during the 12-week programs, will serve both the Dojo’s cohort teams and the greater BSV ecosystem well in the years to come.
Watch: Satoshi Block Dojo opens doors to next generation of BSV entrepreneurs
