KR1 August Update 🎉

5 min readSep 17, 2020

Great Polkadot Memes flying around on Twitter, credits here to ‘DonnieBigBags’

Polkadot DOT Transfers Enabled!

At last, all the waiting was over as Polkadot finally hit the markets! We were tremendously excited to see the reaction by the markets as it chimed with our view that Polkadot represents a major technological improvement in the blockchain space. Polkadot fixes issues with current chains on interoperability, functionality and performance. Over the last six months we have been using Polkadot and Kusama and been super impressed with the way they are designed and respond. It just feels like the future. We love Ethereum and we know it’s set to be ever more important, but new fresh improvements help push the space forward.

With the Polkadot DOT tokens becoming transferable, we were also able to realize our first chunk of accrued staking rewards. We announced our revenue from staking on the Polkadot network and seeing the revenue coming in from DOT staking yields is hugely rewarding for us and our shareholders. Polkadot joined Cosmos as the second major yield-bearing asset in KR1’s portfolio and puts the Company on an even stronger footing for the future for funding future investments and generating solid cash flows.

MetaCartel Ventures DAO

We were excited to announce that we have become members of the MetaCartel Venture Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (“MCV” or “MCV DAO”). For us, the MetaCartel Ventures DAO offers a unique investment opportunity, which brings with it a strong deal flow pipeline where we can contribute our expertise and experience as well as add to it with early-stage projects we are seeing. MetaCartel and all the individuals involved are a highly credible and hugely influential community including the best and brightest people, which will serve it well as it grows. MCV may very well serve as a model on how to manage and govern capital in the future. To date, the MCV DAO has already made several investments, including Reflexer Labs, building ‘RAI’, a low volatility collateral for the DeFi ecosystem, and Zapper Finance, a popular DeFi dashboard and interface.

Peter Pan of MetaCartel Ventures DAO commented: “In crypto we are all on the same team to make change happen and KR1 is a great example of a team that is on your side. KR1 truly cares about the grassroots ethos of Web 3 and is willing to back their beliefs. Excited to see MetaCartel Ventures grow in strength.”

Acala: Rapid Development & Series A

Acala has been delivering at rapid pace over the last few months and successfully completed a Series A funding round, which also saw us with KR1 following on in addition to our initial seed round funding. Acala is positioning itself as a DeFi parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem, offering a decentralised stablecoin, staking derivatives and other finance primitives like a Uniswap-style decentralised exchange etc. The round was a US$7 million ‘Series A’ funding round led by Pantera Capital at a fully-diluted network valuation of US$65 million. The funding round included participation from previous backers, such as Polychain, Hypersphere and us at KR1, as well as new backers including Coinfund and Zee Prime Capital amongst others.

We are super excited about Acala’s vision for the future!

Another update this months was that Acala and Plasm jointly took their first steps deploying their technology to Polkadot with a testnet release of their parachains.

Dfinity Continues to Unveil

The Dfinity team announced Tungsten, the third phase of their complete Dfinity Internet Computer launch plan. Dfinity’s mainnet is planned to be coming later this year. Tungsten will be released with a one-day virtual online session later in September.

The Tungsten release is the third of five milestones that will culminate in the Internet Computer’s full public launch later in 2020.

KR1 in the News!

We’ve been very active writing and were covered in DeFi articles and magazines, check them out below.

The Defiant: A Deep Dive into DeFi Venture Funding

KR1 got name checked as being one of the world’s top 5 DeFi investors in ‘The Defiant’, one of the best news sources for everything DeFi.

TLDR:

Based on the investments analyzed, the most active VC funds by number of deals in the DeFi space are Polychain Capital, A16z, Paradigm Capital, 1Confirmation, Bain Capital Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and KR1. They often act as lead investors in the seed rounds opening the way to many other funds working in the space.

DeFi: A Bigger Bang

Keld’s post on DeFi, ‘DeFi — A Bigger Bang’ was published in CityAm’s crypto publication CryptoAM:

Unchained Unicorns

Keld’s article ‘Unchained Unicorns’ on DeFi was published in CryptoNews:

What Investment: When Words Collide

Keld’s piece ‘When Worlds Collide’ on DeFi was published in the UK Magazine ‘What Investment’ in the September issue and got a front cover mention :)!

KR1 is Europe’s leading digital asset investment company supporting early-stage decentralised and open-source blockchain and DeFi projects. Founded in 2016, KR1 has been a notable first investor in many key projects that will power the decentralised crypto assets, platforms and protocols that form the emerging Web3 infrastructure.

In the spirit of the open and decentralised movement, any individual or institution can buy publicly-listed KR1 shares through the London-based AQSE stock exchange (previously NEX Exchange).