Last week’s CoinGeek Live Conference punctuated an exciting week in Bitcoin news which included the announcement of new Bitcoin businesses, partnerships, acquisitions, investments, technical developments, and more! This post will summarize a few of the highlights and link to additional information on each development. To learn about the other exciting announcements the entire conference is available to view on CoinGeek’s YouTube channel.
Businesses New To Bitcoin
Unbounded Enterprise to Offer Transaction Processing and Other Bitcoin Services
The Unbounded team was well represented at this year’s CoinGeek conference. On Friday, UC Managing Partner Zach Resnick and Special Advisor Bradley Rotter joined a panel on venture investing in the Bitcoin ecosystem. The day prior, Jack Laskey announced the Unbounded team’s newest venture: Unbounded Enterprise.
Unbounded Enterprise is a Bitcoin (BSV) transaction processor, services provider, and services aggregator which aims to drive the integration of Bitcoin into start-ups and existing businesses. Unbounded Enterprise will do this by simplifying the process of Bitcoin integration and acting as a single point-of-contact for businesses seeking to access the growing list of powerful Bitcoin services. The first offering from Unbounded Enterprise will be the launch of a new transaction processor available to companies needing to generate Bitcoin transactions. At the heart of this transaction processing service will be Unbounded Capital portfolio company, Xoken Labs’ new Vega Bitcoin node. By using Xoken Vega, Unbounded Enterprise plans to eliminate existing pain points for Bitcoin transaction generators like the “chained transaction limit” and virtually eliminate concerns of scale limits through enabling parallel transaction processing.
Unbounded Enterprise is currently growing its team and product offering. If you are interested in learning more please contact Unbounded Enterprise at their website and sign up for their email list to stay up to date on their development.
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Kompany Shifting From Unscalable Blockchains to Bitcoin For Enterprise Grade RegTech Solutions
Kompany, a real-time, audit-proof business verification data provider, is developing new solutions for all your business KYC needs. Since 2012, founders Russell Perry & Peter Bainbridge-Clayton have been building blockchain based compliance ‘regtech’, or regulatory technology, focusing on global business verification.
In this environment of volatility and uncertainty, Kompany is developing solutions that are to serve as the first line of defense against money-laundering and other destructive identity practices. With 50 specialists, customers in over 100 countries, and over 200 jurisdictions covered by their service, Kompany is leading the charge in compliance by implementing the unique scaling capabilities of BSV.
Perry & Bainbridge-Clayton explored other blockchain solutions when designing their KYC and KYB server structure. After experimenting with Hyperledger and Ethereum, they came to the unquestionable conclusion that only Bitcoin Satoshi Vision was able to serve as a scalable platform. Kompany is currently developing a marketplace where compliance information can be bought and sold, collaborating with a firm whose “name starts with ’n’ and ends with ’n’”.
Cost of compliance continues to rise as new regulations such as AMLDS in Europe & new FATF recommendations take effect; Kompany’s role in our adaption to dynamic compliance behaviors is pertinent.
For more information about Kompany, visit their website here.
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Veridat and JuvaTech to Use Bitcoin For Restoring Trust in Clinical Research
Veridat and Juvatech are two companies addressing a serious problem in our modern medical system. Dr. Robert Huber of Juvatech and Veridat Director Phillip Runyan claim that the current flawed and vulnerable data procedures along with corruption have destroyed trust in the pharmaceutical space. Seeking to increase transparency and supplant the “honors code” system with something sustainable, Veridat and Juvatech are firms using blockchain solutions to change the pharmaceutical industry.
The integrity of our medical space is critical to our health and safety. Presently the FDA faces a serious issue: “generic” overseas drugs lie beyond the jurisdiction of the institution, meaning a substantial 90% of drugs sold in the US are unable to be verified as safe and ethically produced. With a lack of political and financial resources, the FDA is also unable to verify that information received from pharmaceutical companies is authentic.
Veridat’s flagship product “Bench” is a service that seeks to ensure data authenticity and research verification in pharmacy through cloud-based blockchain solutions. Juvatech, a phenotype-data capturing solution, is already integrating Bench in their infrastructure and the result has been promising. JuvaTech reflects on the low costs of the system, proclaiming integration of Bench could save companies millions of dollars. Both firms promise Bench as a process that could restore trust in the pharmaceutical industry.
Learn more about Veridat here and Juvatech here.
Partnerships
HandCash and Centi Tackle Point-of-Sale
HandCash was busy last week! After their keyless wallet announcement, HandCash announced a new partnership with Bitcoin Point-of-Sale (POS) payments facilitator Centi. While details on the partnership are coming soon, its goal is to enable HandCash users to seamlessly pay for items at existing POS terminals without requiring that the merchant working the POS terminal even knows that the payment is made in Bitcoin.
Centi's solution for providing this POS experience will not be exclusive to HandCash. However, Centi has chosen HandCash as their first partner because of the wallet's popularity and their team's penchant for leading the way on easy-to-use, consumer focused innovations.
Learn more about the HandCash/Centi partnership here.
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Run and RelayX Bring USDC Stable-Coin to Bitcoin
Ever since Bitcoin returned to its original design to enable micropayments at scale, users have desired the ability to pay with small fractions of non-volatile "stable-coins" in Bitcoin applications. Last week, UC portfolio company Run and Bitcoin wallet RelayX delivered the ecosystem's first solution!
RelayX is issuing the new USDC (RUN-SV) token on the Run protocol powered by Bitcoin. The new token is backed 1:1 by the popular USDC (ERC20) stable-coin, effectively backing it 1:1 with the US Dollar.
In conjunction with this launch, RelayX has created a market for BSV/USDC swaps so that Bitcoin application users can convert their Bitcoin into the stable USDC token without leaving the highly efficient Bitcoin network.
This is an exciting development for Bitcoin and a powerful early use case of Run and the Run protocol, which we anticipate will enable the development of many Bitcoin tokens and applications in the years to come!
Learn more about the Run/RelayX partnership on USDC here.
Acquisitions
Bayesian Acquires Money Button
Days prior to the conference, the popular web wallet created by long-time Bitcoin entrepreneur Ryan X Chalres was acquired by financial services and tokenization company The Bayesian Group. The acquisition came as a surprise to many and has prompted wide ranging speculation as to what direction Bayesian, and their new Head of Engineering Ryan X Charles, will take their offerings.
The popular online gaming platform Peergame, which credits Money Button’s simplifying-product with making their business possible, wrote a blog post articulating how they see the acquisition playing out. Peergame identified a key value of Money Button being the ability to eliminate the “funnel” that is common on most applications. Rather than requiring the typical multistep process for users interacting with a website (from registration to log-in to payment to use), Money Button allows users to play games like Peergame without any hassle. The funnel was replaced with Money Button. Peergame’s speculation is that by joining forces with Bayesian, which is already focusing on providing liquidity and token solutions, Money Button might eventually be able to eliminate the funnel for users of other currencies beyond BSV.
If users of BTC, ETH, and even tokenized fiat currencies are able to seamlessly use products that integrate Money Button, the numbers of potential customers for BSV businesses could skyrocket.
Learn more about Bayesian’s acquisition of Money Button here.
Investments
nChain Leads Investment Round For GeoSpock, Preparing for Big Data on Bitcoin
Bitcoin R&D firm nChain made an exciting announcement on the final day of CoinGeek Live. It was announced that they co-led a $5.4 million series A investment round alongside Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC). The round included other large and influential organizations like Global Brain and NTT DOCOMO.
Global Brain is a Tokyo based VC firm which has raised several funds since 2001. Its most recent fund, Global Brain Corporation Fund VI, raised $180 Million in July 2017. To date, Global Brain has invested in over 100 companies with 17 going to IPO and 48 going to M&A.
NTT DOCOMO is the predominant mobile operator in Japan with 79 million subscribers, over 50% of Japan’s cellular market. NTT DOCOMO is consistently at the forefront of mobile services innovation with 3G, 4G LTE, and now 5G as of March 2020.
The quality and scope of the investors in this round suggest a bright future for GeoSpock and high expectations for Bitcoin’s data processing capabilities. GeoSpock is focused on the analysis of massively scaled datasets from applications like IoT on transportation systems in smart cities. During GeoSpock’s presentation they talked about processing queries on trillion (with a T!) row datasets. In a press release GeoSpock CEO said,
“As our technological world continues to grow, so too must our abilities to benefit from the data opportunities it creates. Truly understanding the order and magnitude of our ambition, nChain is an ideal strategic investor. They are the clear leaders in enterprise-grade blockchain solutions, and we hope that our technology will enable them to develop unforeseen, world-scale applications for blockchain.”
The new partnership between nChain, CIC, GeoSpock, Global Brain, and NTT DOCOMO hints at the exciting potential for a future of a massively scaled Bitcoin which can process enormous amounts of data and then make that data useful through myriad currently nonexistent use cases and applications.
Learn more about nChain’s investment in GeoSpock here.
Technical Developments
Xoken Vega Node Implementation
Jack Laskey’s presentation at CoinGeek didn’t only announce Unbounded Enterprise, it also announced Xoken Lab’s upcoming Bitcoin node: Xoken Vega. When Unbounded Capital invested in Xoken Labs it was largely due to their founder Nithin Mani’s penchant for innovating infrastructure necessary for Bitcoin to thrive at scale. With Xoken Vega, Nithin brought his vision for scale straight to the Bitcoin node, which when launched, will allow node operators to scale out horizontally by adding as many resources to their operation as required. This is a key innovation for the near and long term future of Bitcoin.
Xoken is planning to launch Vega in conjunction with Unbounded Enterprise’s transaction processing service sometime in Q1 2020. Learn more about Xoken Vega here.
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HandCash Goes Keyless
Last week, UC portfolio company HandCash announced that its users will soon be able to securely use their HandCash mobile wallets without first having to worry about saving and protecting complex Bitcoin keys or cumbersome 12 word seed phrases. By leveraging an innovative cryptographic process called a "threshold signature scheme,” HandCash users will be able to safely begin using their wallets after setting up an account with their email address and phone number, a process familiar to users who have created accounts on any other non-Bitcoin application.
Despite the radically improved onboarding experience for HandCash users, their funds will be secure and HandCash will remain a non-custodial wallet.
This update will be live upon launch of HandCash 2.5 scheduled for early October 2020. Read more about it here.