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Articles by Calvin
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The Ayre Group and Nikki Beach hospitality group partner to bring a resort & spa, beach club and residences to Antigua

On 16 October 2024 in the presence of the Honourable Gaston Browne, Prime Minister of Antigua & Barbuda, Ayre Group and Nikki Beach announced their partnership to open the Nikki Beach Resort & Spa Antigua, which will also feature a beach club – Nikki Beach Antigua – as well as branded, private Nikki Beach Residences. Also in attendance were Lucia Penrod, Co-founder and CEO of Nikki Beach Hospitality Group, Calvin Ayre, Chairman of the Ayre Group, the Honourable Kelvin Simons, MP for St Mary’s South, the Honourable St. Clair Soleyn, representing the Minister of Tourism, and Sir Clare K Roberts KC, Deputy Governor General of Antigua, along with invited local and international guests and media. The US $400m+ development will be an immediate neighbour to the Jolly Harbour community. 

The partnership was announced at an early evening groundbreaking ceremony on Jolly Beach, the location for the new development. The mile long Jolly Beach is located on the island’s beautiful west coast, an immaculate example of one of Antigua’s 365 powdery-white sand beaches. Guests were given a taste of the vision for the resort with a short video featuring artist impressions of the future destination and drone imagery of the location.

Nikki Beach Hospitality Group prides itself on providing guests with an unrivalled and distinctive barefoot luxury lifestyle experience. The properties feature cutting-edge architecture, contemporary dining, indulgent Nikki Spa services and signature entertainment, creating an atmosphere that caters to those seeking both high and low energy offerings.

Nikki Beach Resort & Spa Antigua will become a marketing anchor for the broader tourism destination of Antigua and catalyse local private investment. The property will boast state of the art facilities including 82 hotel rooms and suites, 181 luxury branded residences of up to four bedrooms, comprising studios, apartments, and beach-front villas of varying sizes, with a total of 263 resort keys reflecting 876 guest beds on-site. Additionally, owners of the branded residences will be able to participate in a rental programme. 

Besides the iconic beach club with its own boat drop-off point, there will be five additional food and beverage outlets on-site as well as extensive health and wellness areas including Tone Gym and Nikki Spa. This will also include cryo, hyperbaric, hydrothermal, red-light, and IV therapy rooms, an aquatic centre, and an exclusive residence owner’s lounge with a private gym.

The combination of world-class facilities nestled in breathtaking natural beauty will make Nikki Beach Resort & Spa Antigua and the Nikki Beach Residences a high-end destination for guests and residence owners alike.

The Antigua resort has been designed by HKS Architects and ROAM Interior Design, two of the world’s leading design firms for the hospitality, leisure, and entertainment industries. A hallmark of HKS’s award-winning work is their attention and sensitivity to the influences of local culture, natural resources, local communities, and the spirit of the location. 

For overseas buyers, investment in the exclusive branded Residences will also provide eligibility for the Antiguan Citizenship by Investment programme. This programme offers individuals and their families, where applicable, Antiguan citizenship which includes visa free travel to over 150 countries. 

A significant investment will be made in the resort’s development, and the expectation is that around 300 long term jobs will be created on the island along with a similar number of shorter-term construction jobs. During construction, a diverse workforce will be required for the project and once operational the resort will create significant full-time employment, resulting from the expected high levels of occupancy. Local suppliers will expand to cater for the resort’s operational needs, as well as to independently service a higher volume of tourists throughout the region. 

The sales launch of the residences will be in late 2025 with Blueprint Global leading the sales and marketing. Interested parties can pre-register at Nikki Beach Residences Antigua.

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News & Views

Articles by Calvin
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Teranode realises the potential of blockchain technology

Originally published on The Fintech Times on March 18, 2024

Blockchain, heralded for its potential to transform industries, is currently undergoing a divergence from its original vision, marked by a prioritisation of speculative interests over core principles like scalability and decentralisation.

Calvin Ayre, venture capitalist and founder of Ayre Group, a global enterprise supporting real estate projects, businesses, and technologies, shares insights centered on the BSV Blockchain’s Teranode scaling solution.

The BSV Blockchain’s Teranode scaling solution will fundamentally shift how the world views blockchain technology while fulfilling Satoshi Nakamoto‘s vision for Bitcoin as a robust and secure network that can scale to meet any demand.

The current view of blockchain technology (and cryptocurrency) focuses almost exclusively on record-high fiat values of tokens like BTC (which is wrongly referred to as ‘Bitcoin’ by mainstream media). The perception of Bitcoin as ‘digital gold’ is light years from Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision of a highly scalable platform to handle peer-to-peer electronic cash while offering safe, secure, and immutable data storage for enterprises and governments.

From inception, Satoshi envisioned a network that could scale to exceed the transaction capacity of Visa and Mastercard. Months after Bitcoin launched, Satoshi stated: “The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never hits a scale ceiling.”

However, some developers betrayed this revolutionary blueprint making controversial alterations to the Bitcoin network protocol. The resulting technology (BTC) was limited to an underwhelming seven transactions per second (TPS), rendering it unfit for mass adoption, so it leveraged price and became ‘digital gold’, creating today’s reality.

The Teranode protocol upgrade is the light at the end of the tunnel, enabling the BSV Blockchain—which honours Satoshi’s original vision—to process upwards of 1.1 million TPS, dwarfing the current capacity of both Visa and Mastercard combined. Better still, it will accomplish this at a fraction of the cost.

Teranode has three main components:

  • Distributed network of core nodes
  • Specialisation and isolation of components and their roles
  • Microtransactions, combining information and value

With Teranode at its core, BSV will be the backbone infrastructure for a global system of multiple specialised overlay networks.

The blockchain sector is notorious for overpromising and underdelivering. However, Teranode is not some whiteboard mirage that teases a technological paradise that never gets any closer.

In February, the BSV Association partnered with Aerospike, a leader in real-time, high-performance NoSQL databases, to subject Teranode to a rigorous six-month stress test ahead of its full node implementation later in 2024.

Teranode’s impact will be both dramatic and widespread. Enterprises and government agencies will finally have a secure and cost-effective next-generation platform to process and store sensitive information.

One example of Teranode’s transformative potential is as a repository of verifiable and auditable information on which new artificial intelligence (AI) applications can be trained. The net result will be large language models plagued by fewer ‘hallucinations’ that can be damaging and cause many people to lose faith in AI.

Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is another technology that has run far ahead of tangible progress, mainly because no public blockchain can handle the staggering number of individual addresses that IPv6 permits and Web 3.0 demands. Again, Teranode-enhanced BSV’s unbounded capacity will open the floodgates and finally allow these long-stalled Web 3.0 projects to move forward.

BSV blockchain further distinguishes itself from the competition through its willingness to work within existing laws and regulations. The BSV Association’s recent introduction of enhanced Network Access Rules will facilitate Digital Asset Recovery, the process by which victims of lost or stolen assets can reclaim their property via legal channels. The mantra of ‘not your keys, not your coins’ may suit ‘crypto bros’, but it’s a significant obstacle to a more inclusive financial system looking to grow beyond its clubby early-adopter roots.

Emerging technologies

I’ve always had a fascination with emerging technologies, both in my personal and professional lives. As an early Bitcoin adopter, it was hard to watch a small core of developers hijack the network for their selfish aims, redirect it onto a siding, and ultimately halt its future potential. But there is still time to reverse this trend, get Bitcoin back on its original track, finally deliver on Satoshi’s revolutionary vision.

Outside BSV blockchain, the prevailing obsession with token value is what happens when blockchains are incapable of doing anything beyond marking time. The combination of BSV and Teranode makes for some unbeatable technology.

In the past, self-interested developers forced the world to accept their degraded, proprietary version of Bitcoin, their motto was ‘don’t trust; verify’. A noble sentiment, and I don’t expect anyone reading this to take my words on faith. Investigate the reality for yourself. Take a closer look at BSV and Teranode and see if they aren’t everything, I said they are. You’ll be glad you did.

To find out more about BSV Blockchain and Teranode, visit www.bsvblockchain.org/teranode.

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