These days, it often seems there’s little we can agree on in society. Can we at least agree these are polarizing times? (See what I did there??)

One thing we’ll surely agree on is this: One of the greatest debates of our time is ‘Star Trek vs. Star Wars.’ It seems you gotta pick a side; how many people do you know that are equally Trekkies and Star Warriors/Warsies/[whatever they call themselves] people?

I fall squarely into the Trekkie camp, particularly the ‘The Next Generation’ Series from the late 1980s/1990s. So when I started trying to count how many enterprise-focused businesses are building on BSV Blockchain, my mind jumped to one of my favourite episodes (Season 7, “Parallels,” first aired on November 29, 1993, if you’re curious).

In this one, Klingon crew member Lieutenant Worf is stuck in some kind of breach of the space-time continuum, and at one point, an infinite number of Starship Enterprises appear until the rift is closed. By the way, who HASN’T been stuck in a space-time continuum breach at one point in their lives, eh?

The Great ‘Enterprise vs. Consumer’ Debate, Continued

This is an occasional hotly debated topic in blockchain circles. Which is the bigger driver of growth, adoption, value, valuations, etc. – consumer facing businesses (‘B2C’) or enterprise-focused businesses (‘B2B’, or ‘B2B2C’, if your offering helps businesses ultimately serve consumers). And does it matter?

I still believe enterprise-focused businesses are ‘a cut above,’ and deservedly so. For a business to win over other businesses, especially large, enduring companies, you need to bring a very high level of professionalism, an excellent product offering, demonstrate they can scale quickly, possibly help them with global adoption, and if you’re successful, these can be very fruitful, ‘sticky’ clients – especially if you have a SaaS (or BaaS)-like long-term offering.

Having Said That…

However, there’s nothing wrong with consumer-facing businesses, including fintech companies that help users get onboarded and offer on/offramps, and importantly, gaming companies and loyalty programs, which can also scale very quickly.

Enterprise Use Cases – Q1 2023 Update

Let’s catch up on enterprise adoption. Here are just a few of the announcements we saw in Q1 2023:

nChain was busy with enterprise-related announcements – Leading iGaming CRM platform Symplify and nChain announced a partnership to revolutionize that industry with “…cutting-edge solutions that will bring an enhanced layer of efficiency, security, and transparency to the industry.” Other key announcements: A TradeWindow supply chain solutions MoU, working with E-Livestock to ‘tokenize cows’ and improve African farming, partnerships with W2 and Crucial Compliance, investment and partnerships with Gate2Chain, Transmira, UNISOT, Asset Layer, etc.

Property management software company and newest Ayre Ventures investee company Over-C will build insurance industry-focused blockchain-based risk solutions on BSV Blockchain.

Vaionex tweeted that a Fortune 500 company had selected their Relysia unit’s infrastructure and was actively in test mode, not to mention that many BSV Blockchain companies, including stablecoins (plural!), are Vaionex clients.

Payments platform company Centi launched its stablecoin, the first on BSV. This will blow the doors wide open for their merchant partners. As Centi stated, the Swiss Franc-pegged stablecoin, part of its Global Payment Network, “allows merchants to get direct payment settlement into their banks…without the need to change accounting procedures [and provides] them with the same service they are used to from the Credit Card industry while cutting fee costs by up to 99%.”

Furthermore, Centi’s solution “offers seamless integration with online, POS, and cashier payment systems,” providing a complete solution to online and brick-and-mortar merchants, such as online payments partner Payrexx, who announced that its 50,000 merchants can now offer Centi as a payment method and accept its Swiss franc stablecoin.

Enterprise BaaS provider mintBlue was busy! The company announced the enhancement of its e-invoicing solution, in collaboration with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce and its customer VISMA | yuki; it allows for automatic ID verification of senders and recipients of invoices, improving efficiency, transparency, and the reduction of risk of e-invoicing fraud.

Oh, and they also set a world record for daily transactions on a public blockchain. mintBlue said, “As a startup serving large corporate clients, we value proof points of our scaling capabilities. Instead of asking them nicely to trust us, we took it as an opportunity to stress test our infrastructure and prove our abilities while doing it. Each [of the 50.53 million transactions] contained documents, such as contracts, credentials, invoices, micropayments and receipts,” and very importantly – when dealing with enterprise clients that rightfully demand low and stable costs, the “experiment only incurred €400 in fees.”

Rekord ‘hit the ball outta the park’ (that’s a baseball analogy, James Marchant) testing its Industrial Internet of Things (‘IIoT’) solutions with a 3D printer client on only six machines that essentially ‘live streamed’ their manufacturing data. Like mintBlue, Rekord proved yet again what is only possible on BSV Blockchain: Rekord’s tests peaked at 23.66MM transactions on-chain in one day, with a total data size of 8.9GB and for total fees of $473.14, a per-transaction fee of $0.00002 (note that mintBlue’s per-transaction fee was $0.000008 – that’s ‘five zeroes then an 8’, but who’s counting!).

James said, “All new 3D printers [of our client] will have Rekord IoT devices installed, allowing a huge variety of applications to be developed on top of the BSV Blockchain, bridging the gap between blockchain, IoT and robotics/manufacturing.”

In its tests, Rekord not only demonstrated IIoT solutions for clients, but also helped ‘pave the path forward’ regarding Bitcoin transaction processing fees; after all, the ‘mining reward,’ as Satoshi Nakamoto made clear in the White Paper (and countless times since) is a declining subsidy that will halve again next year. As James stated, “I’m now totally certain Rekord can singlehandedly not only make up for the reduced block subsidy at the next halving but start to push back the other way…in terms of transactions fee generation offsetting against the reduction in subsidy.”

Wait…How Many Enterprises? 

As I recapped these highlights, I wondered just how many with a B2B or B2B2C focus are using BSV Blockchain? Many more than I’d have guessed!

JUST SOME of the Enterprise-Focused Businesses on BSV Blockchain We’re Aware of:

To recap, these companies are using BSV Blockchain for their customers (who are themselves enterprises or government agencies) in specific industries, such as supply chain, industrial manufacturing, healthcare, Bitcoin infrastructure itself, real estate, property management, media/entertainment, and on and on…or they’re using BSV Blockchain for their own internal purposes.

So, how many enterprise-focused companies are using BSV Blockchain?

The ‘Flight of the Conchords’ Team Sympathizing with Me

Enterprise vs. Consumer Adoption – Who Rules the Roost?

I wanted to dig a little deeper and find out which focus generates more value, and one way to look at this is through the lens of the capital markets and how investors faired.

It used to be the case that enterprise-focused businesses brought more investor value than consumer businesses, but this has reversed course in recent years when it comes to IPOs (companies going public on the various stock markets of the world).

However, on the mergers & acquisitions front, the vast majority of value is still derived from enterprise-focused businesses (more than 2x that of consumer-focused companies, in M&As of $1B+. Source: Sapphire Ventures). Also of note, there are more $1B+ enterprise IPOs than consumer IPOs.

So, What IS the Point!?

This: Big consumer use case wins in BSV Blockchain may be as important as enterprise wins, and we at Ayre Ventures would be delighted to see HandCash, Centbee, or FYX Gaming ‘win the race,’ to pick a few examples.

Ultimately, it could be ‘six of one, half dozen of the other’ (or for our British friends, ‘it’s as broad as it is long’)…but I’ll still argue there’s a higher level of ‘wow’ attributable to corporations big and small using enterprise solutions via BSV Blockchain to create or solidify ‘unfair advantage’ by mintBlue, nChain, UNISOT, Vaionex, or Over-C, for examples.

What about the Bigguns?

If you’re saying ‘ok, but when are the big corporates coming?’ Not sure when we might see Starbucks or FedEx or Lloyd’s of London announce a deployment on BSV Blockchain, but meanwhile:

• mintBlue long ago announced massive cloud software company VISMA as a client (with public commentary from VISMA). VISMA had over €2B in 2022 revenue and 14,000 employees.
• CertiHash works with IBM.
• Vaionex is working with an as-yet-unnamed Fortune 500 company.
• Over-C’s partners include Hitachi, Eli Lilly, and Savills.
• ROW8/Rad works with many (all?) Hollywood studios.

So, they’re already here, and many more are coming, guaranteed.

Meanwhile, Everywhere Else in ‘Blockchain’…Crickets

I’d say we’re well on our way and are outshining LITERALLY ALL OTHER BLOCKCHAINS in terms of enterprise adoption, not to mention all other measures of actual utility and scalability.

Importantly, ain’t it fun that we have the luxury of having the ‘enterprise vs. consumer’ debate, not to mention the debates about the validity of 50 million+ daily transactions going on-chain that are ‘just test transactions’ (note the BSV Blockchain network held up just fine)…while some other blockchains can’t figure out how to keep the lights on every day?

Actual Footage of Solana Team Upgrading Their Network…

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.

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.”