KR1 June Update 🌇

We’ve had some cool projects bubbling for awhile and we can now release some of the news.

Cool New Investments 😎

Dfinity

Dfinity is a large scale blockchain cloud supercomputer focused on high speed big business enterprise applications. We have been interested in their research for a long time — well since Feb 2017! And we are excited to announce that we are supporting them by investing GBP£593,000 for a total of 191,681.85 Dfinity Network Tokens and helping in the community building. Watch Keld and Arthur Falls from Dfinity at a KR1 KRYPTONIGHT meetup, and also watch Arthur being interviewed by Mike Butcher’s jacket at this years Pathfounder event.

“DFINITY has been fortunate to receive support from KR1. The KR1 team has been invaluable in their facilitation of events in London, and their generous capital contribution was greatly appreciated.“

- Arthur Falls, Head of Communication, Dfinity

Flying Carpet

We also seed invested USD $100,000 in Flying Carpet, a decentralised autonomous transport layer led by Julien Bouteloup. It sounds a bit of a mouthful but its a very clever combination of blockchain plus existing idle transport inventory, which will unlock a huge amount of value for operators and customers as well as open up new industries especially for developing nations. We particularly love the fact that Flying Carpet is in use with Coconut farmers in Papua New Guinea!

“KR1 have been there from the beginning in supporting the Ethereum and crypto community grow and thats why we choose to work with KR1.” Julien Bouteloup, Founder, Flying Carpet.

We are very excited about the work Julien his team and advisors, including Viktor Tron (Ethereum Foundation), have been doing and look forward to seeing how they progress. Watch George and Juliens’ flying jacket at a KR1 KRYPTONIGHT meetup.

Connext

We are stoked to announce (very belatedly!) our support of Connext. Arjun and his team have been working really hard on some key issues swirling around crypto for awhile pivoting from converting credit card payments into crypto tokens into something marvellous — solving Ethereum’s fabled scaling issues! Connext is now a layer two scaling platform that lets Ethereum projects enable lightning fast transactions for their users!

Connext can solve Ethereums’ scaling and gas cost issues

What does this mean? Connext securely moves transactions to a networked, trustless, off-chain layer, state channels minimize the transaction fees and times that prevent blockchain apps from scaling. What people don’t talk about (shhh!) is the rising Gas costs in using Ethereum dapps so Connext solves this. Users deposit their funds into a smart contract with a Connext Hub. Then, they can pay any other user that is also connected to that Hub simply by signing a state update. Funds remain secure because parties can settle disputes on the underlying blockchain at any time. Peasy!

Out and about

Paul Astengo, George McDonaugh, Nick Cowan at Google’s Startup Grind

George spoke at Google’s Startup Grind held at the Westminster Central Hall, London on June 12th with a Gibraltar specific panel discussion titled ‘Gibraltar: The Crypto Harbour For Blockchain and Fintech’ Nick Cowan CEO of the GBX chaired the talk with George and Paul Astengo, Senior Executive at Gibraltar Finance and Co-Chair of the DLT Working Group.

Nick asked George McDonaugh what his views on Gibraltar as a jurisdiction for fintech and blockchain companies were, to which George replied:

“We see projects come to us and our network looking for jurisdictions. Where can they start a company? Who do they talk to? And we started to ask the same questions, then our relationship with GBX started. It is like everyone has swallowed the blockchain pill, and everyone knows what’s going on.”

Keld was also in action on two panels at Web Summit’s new MoneyConf conference on June 12th in Dublin. MoneyX was the intimate track inside the larger MoneyConf and also included the crypto segment of the conference.

The crypto section of the conference was obviously a test run by Paddy Cosgrove for a full CryptoX conference next year. Keld was in the main blockchain panel hosted by David from Vice News — it was a cozy crypto chat in the Harry Potter style library with Henri from Streamr and Olga from SmartValor.

Above: Keld van Schreven from @KR1plc , Henri Pihkala from @streamrinc , David Gilbert from @vicenews , Olga Feldmeier from @smartvalorinc

Coming up

Don’t miss one of our portfolio projects Rlay at the upcoming Coinscrum meetup, which we sponsor. The brilliant Michael Hirn, founder of Rlay, will be decloaking :)

Coinscrum Meetup featuring Zen and Rlay

Coinscrum {Presents} - The Zen Protocol // RLAY

Don’t miss the legend that is Ryan from FOAM at this month’s Ethereum London (ETH LDN) meetup. Watch George and Ryan at a KR1 KRYPTONIGHT meetup.

#ETHLDN featuring FOAM, Token Analyst and Arkilio

Also catch us at the one of the most important decentralised projects on this planet, Polkadot, who have a rare London meetup July 12th at 93 Feet East — here for the invite. In Gav we (still) trust!

In Gav we trust. Polkadot status update in London, July 12th.

Enjoy the World Cup and hopefully we can release some super cool news next month!