December at KR1 was about readying ourselves for 2019 and as we mentioned in our November update we completed a small raise to bolster our reserves for some more strategic investments without having to sell down crypto assets that are currently undervalued in this bear market.
In mid-December we went to Gibraltar to meet with several of our advisors and partners including GBX, of which we are founding sponsors and investors. We discussed the new STACS protocol and went through our pipeline of new listings for GBX. We also met with our good friend Ramsey Khoury who is Business Lead on Chainspace and Vega, two new and hugely exciting projects coming out of Gibraltar. Chainspace is a new global scale smart contract platform, watch a presentation here or see our roundup of their Offsite at Devon4 demo in October from our October blog post. Vega protocol is a protocol for the decentralised margin trading of custom financial products. We are very excited about the future of both of these projects.
The Boy is Back in Town!
Vitalik, our spiritual leader, and Ethereum founder popped in to give an update at ETH LDN meetup. This was a rare visit by Vitalik to the London audience. Vitalik got into a discussion with Itamar Lesuisse from Argent about UX (after they won the Devcon 4 UX award). We are proud to have seed funded Argent and it’s going to be a great year for them so we urge everyone to give their wallet a try on your phone. It solves big pain points for storing and sending crypto. Join the wallet waitlist here.
In other portfolio news FOAMs initial use period is over, and is listed first on the ‘OG’ crypto exchange Poloniex. The exchange also recently added Livepeer, another incredible project (we are not investors though).
Cosmos (Disclaimer, we are major bagholders :D) launched the Game of Stakes, an incentivized testnet for validators preceding mainnet launch. There’s definite signs we’ll be getting our hands on our ATOMs soon! Cosmos wants to have a stable network running for four weeks prior to launching mainnet, so the clock is ticking. Then a little bit after launch they’ll introduce IBC (Inter Blockchain Communication) so that lots of other projects including FOAM and Althea Mesh (another KR1 investment) can benefit from the Cosmos technology. We are very excited about Cosmos being in the centre of the new Web3 economy and its mainnet is hopefully released drama free Q1 this year.
Meet us at…
M-1 Event in Zug, Switzerland
M-1 Conference will be a super interesting event for the (Water) Melon project! Melonport will unveil the governance council and gather everyone involved and building with the (Water) Melon protocol in Zug in early February. Keld will be featured with Will from Passport Capital and Russel from GABI.
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