Participated · Equity · Aug 2020

Oin Finance is a DeFi firm building liquidity-pool lending platforms on the Ontology blockchain with cross-chain functionality. The company closed a $1M private sale round from a group of blockchain investors. OIN plans a public token sale on August 26, with participation decided by a lottery, followed by a listing on a decentralized exchange and later on a centralized exchange. Its product roadmap includes liquidity mining through its DEX and a loans platform starting on Ontology, with expansion to other top platforms via cross-chain bridges. OIN is building bridge technology to integrate Ethereum into its ecosystem and has announced a partnership with Qtum to include that platform in its ecosystem similarly to ETH. The CEO, Renard Zhang, said the lottery approach was chosen because community interest exceeded the company’s initial funding plans.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2020

RAMP DEFI builds a cross-chain liquidity on/off ramp that lets holders of staked, non-ERC-20 assets collateralize locked assets into a stablecoin called rUSD. rUSD holders can borrow, lend, or exchange rUSD with eUSD (an ERC-20 equivalent) to provide seamless liquidity on and off various chains while continuing to receive staking rewards and retain upside. The project emphasizes a metric called Total Value Unlocked (TVU) rather than TVL, and cites an addressable market of roughly $22 billion in staked assets. RAMP closed an oversubscribed private sale raising over $1 million from prominent crypto investors. The team has announced a public token sale scheduled for August 29, 2020 offering 10,000,000 RAMP tokens to whitelisted participants and expects a Uniswap listing soon after. RAMP announced a partnership with Elrond to deliver solutions for eGLD holders and has a stated vision of achieving $1 billion in TVU for users by the end of 2021.

Led · Equity · Jul 2019

Rain operates a digital asset trading platform that enables users to buy, sell and store cryptocurrencies under the oversight of the Central Bank of Bahrain. After spending two years in the CBB’s regulatory sandbox, the company secured a full Crypto-Asset Module (CRA) license, becoming the first project to graduate from the program. Founded in 2018, Rain aims to close the regional gap in crypto on-ramps by offering a locally regulated alternative to offshore exchanges. The company intends to channel newly raised capital into further infrastructure development and key hires to strengthen its compliance and engineering teams. By positioning itself as a compliant gateway for Middle Eastern users, Rain hopes to capture growing demand for digital assets in the region. No revenue, user numbers or other operating metrics were disclosed in the article.

Participated · Equity · May 2018

SpringRole is an Indian blockchain professional network led by founder and CEO Kartik Mandaville that combines artificial intelligence and blockchain to eliminate fraud from user profiles. The platform seeks to give weight to online professional reputation and enable people to be rewarded for their endorsements. It is building features including directory listing, search, a job board, work attestation and reputation scoring. SpringRole has launched a referral program that allows beta users to invite their network in exchange for SPRING tokens. The company has announced product partnerships with WorkCoin and Bloom to extend its offerings. In February, Rick Marini of Protocol Ventures and Alex Waters of ELM Labs joined as advisors. SpringRole aims initially to penetrate the Indian market for technical professionals and to become a meaningful asset for U.S. and European companies setting up offshore capabilities in India.