At KR1 we support and invest in the best and most disruptive decentralised projects in the world. We support projects and teams looking to help bring about radical change and social improvement through decentralised technologies, and to help fix the broken internet that we have.
We had an incredible 2017 and took a breath at the end of December and we had a thought we would get a gentle start to 2018, but January started off at a blistering pace! To kick off we released news on some investments we made from the tail end of 2017.
PROPS by YouNow
We normally sit out tokenising existing platforms as most of them are retro-fitted, but PROPS has a real chance to properly incentivise social media activity, plus the numbers, the incredible team and strong commitment to fully move into a decentralised vision were compelling! PROPS decentralises the digital media economy solving the biggest problem in social, in their own words:
“(…) a few platforms dominate social, and control digital media distribution. Their strength depends on millions of users creating and sharing content, but only a small fraction of the hundreds of billions in enterprise value that they have amassed flows back to those that create it. PROPS ensures that network value flows back to the people who help it grow, better aligning stakeholders across the platform.”
Simple Token
We were early fans and backers of Jason Goldberg and Simple Token. Simple Token already has 11 new projects on the platform including Treat, License Rocks, Korhal.io, Lytepay, OSTKYC to name a few.
Bluzelle
We also released our Bluzelle investment. Pavel and Neeraj are building a key piece of the decentralisation puzzle for developers and just finished their successful public sale. They can finally get back to building their product and educate more developers of the possibilities of building on top of Bluzelle. Watch Pavel giving the NEO developers community an overview about their work at NEO DEVCON in late January.
CoinDesk covered what Pavel, Neeraj, and team were up to recently and we got a timely quote in the Bluzelle CoinDesk article.
Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange (GBX)
We are excited to announce that we have participated in the private sale and are going to be strategic early adopters for the world’s first state-sanctioned digital asset exchange and token sale platform, GBX or the Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange. Referred to as “The Crypto Harbour”, Gibraltar has implemented a new, blockchain-friendly regulation to encourage blockchain focussed projects to incorporate in a friendly crypto environment. GBX and Gibraltar have the ability to become another safe harbour for crypto in Europe. KR1 will be open for submission from new projects to then potentially be listed on GBX either as a primary exchange and token sale platform or as a secondary listing. GBX will include listings for pure utility tokens as well as tokenised securities.
Elastos
We also released news of participating in Elastos a new decentralised operating system for dApps with huge potential. Elastos makes up one of China’s G3 blockchain companies, along with NEO and Bitmain. With over 10,000,000 lines of code and their own blockchain, Elastos is creating a secure new operating system to make digital assets scarce, identifiable and tradable. The Elastos platform will be targeting decentralised applications (dApps) that run on a peer-to-peer network with no centralised control and has the potential to revolutionise how we access movies, images, and other digital assets.
January Events
First (proper!) London NEO Meetup — January 10th
Speakers included Malcolm Lerider from the NEO Coucil and as well as speakers from City of Zion and the Qlink project.
Join the NEO LONDON meetup group here.
Gibraltar House — January 15th
George gave a State of the Union speech at Gibraltar House in London in front of an invite-only packed crowd hosted by the Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange (GBX) . He was followed by Nick Cowan, CEO of GBX on an outline of what GBX intends to do. Even though the future of exchanges is decentralised we see GBX as a trusted place of curated tokens, and an important on-ramp for institutions and fiat.
KRYPTONIGHT ZERO — January 16th
We held our first KRYPTONIGHT meetup in London and had an amazing lineup of projects — see the full blog post with videos here.
Follow the hashtag KRYPTONIGHT on Twitter, see the full blog post with videos here and join us for our next KRYPTONIGHT here.
CFA Society UK — Fintech Interactive Forum — January 26th
George was on a panel on Cryptocurrencies and ICOs at the CFA UK’s first major conference of 2018 to explore emerging themes around crypto-currencies, blockchain technology, crowdfunding and ICOs, robo-advice, scalability, new markets and start-up capital, law and regulatory changes and even biological computing in an informal and creative setting.
First TechCrunch Zug Meetup in Crypto Valley — January 29th
We co-sponsored the first TechCrunch Zug meetup in “Crypto Valley” Zug (Switzerland) together with Melonport. After back to back conferences at DLD and Davos the legend Mike Butcher, Editor-at-large of TechCrunch, gave a great speech (does he ever sleep?).
NEO Devcon, San Francisco — January 30th
Shiny and Green
…seeing shiny and green - we are rebranding from KRYPTONITE1 to KR1, which has always been our ticker symbol on the NEX exchange since we started this journey almost two years ago. A global entertainment company didn’t like us continuing to use the Kryptonite brand in relation to the shiny green stuff in our logo… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ …KR1 it is!
KR1 plc is a publicly listed investment company to provide exposure to the world’s best decentralised blockchain projects, which will change the world. Our shares currently trade on the London-based NEX Exchange. Remember, you can fill up your upcoming UK ISA before end of March with KR1 shares and receive tax-free gains without worry about losing your wallet keys, getting hacked or fear of the taxman. Find out how to do that here.
Keep Hodling!
