KR1 March Update 🥁

6 min readApr 7, 2018

There are over 300 crypto funds in the world and more every week, but KR1 is different. Almost all crypto funds are private, we are fully public and listed on the London NEX stock market, which means anyone can buy shares in our company. We are truly transparent in keeping with the open source, decentralised projects we love and support. We were also the world’s first token investment company, pioneers in backing digital-asset based network organisations. We work with the best decentralised projects in the world and as the snow flurries and freezing weather chilled the already chilled crypto markets, we were running red hot! Busy on investing, supporting and planning new initiatives.

Investments

Busy busy busy. We did not plan this busy a March. It was probably our most action packed month, with new projects appearing on the radar… some we can mention and some we can’t… yet :)

Nexus Mutual

We seed funded London based Nexus Mutual. Founder Hugh Karp is taking on the mutual market with the same age-old model but scalable through blockchain. The product market fit focused on smart contract developers and code security auditors for now, appealing to a blockchain-native crowd. Nexus Mutual will initially launch with a single product, Smart Contract Cover. This will provide a fixed claim pay-out should the designated smart contract be used in an “unintended way that results in financial loss”, like The DAO Hack or the more recent Parity multi-sig wallet issues. Try the demo here.

*Janos, Steve and Hugh from Nexus, Keld and George.*

We’re really excited to be supported by KR1 as we build out our vision of a decentralised mutual. Mutual’s are naturally focussed on the community and KR1 have been a key member of the Ethereum community from the beginning, so we couldn’t think of a better partner to have.

— Hugh Karp, Founder of Nexus Mutual

Argent

We are excited to announce an investment in a new type of digital wallet called Argent. Argent will go a long way to solving the current issues in storing and moving tokens safely. Its founder Itamar Lesuisse has a proven track record of scaling consumer products to users in a multiple of millions. If you’re interested to work with them check out their openings.

“We’re very excited to work with the KR1 team and leverage their deep expertise to build the future of the decentralised web.”
- Julien Niset, Co-Founder of Argent

Herdius

We made an investment in Herdius, a new exciting decentralised project based out of Berlin. Herdius’ founder Balazs Deme has a big vision for a new type of financial platfrom starting with a decentralised exchanged layer with sharded private keys. We are really excited about the project.

Out and About

Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris

Vlad, Vitalik, Karl and crew gathered at one of the prime community gatherings, EthCC Paris, this month. While there were not too many new projects premiering, we got reacquainted with some brilliant minds and saw plenty of innovation and progress happening from great teams in the space. We also had the fortune to catch Vitalik’s Plasma Cash talk.

*Vitalik and something to do with marmots*

Jordi Baylina gave a great presentation on new ERC Token Standards. All of the presentations and slots were live-streamed and are available on Youtube, check them out here, here, here and here (four different Youtube channels as slots were running live in parallel). In the evening, KR1 hosted an EthCC Paris dinner and the crypto conversation flowed.

*EthCC Dinner in Paris — With Jez San (Funfair),* *Evan van Ness* (*Week In Ethereum*), Owen Barnes, Hugh from Nexus Mutual, Keld, George and Janos from KR1, Nic Saxlund, Stuart Mast, Pamir, Yiseul, Patricio, Jack du Rose from Colony, Itamar & Julien from Argent, Manu & James from Block0, Rafael from Alice.

*KR1 and Rafael from Alice and a special guest in Paris EthCC!*

Crypto Investor Show in London

Thousands of the curious and a mass of hodlers queued around blocks on a grey London Saturday in March just to get in. We sponsored some of the show and George was on a key panel on the token economy.

KR1’s George on the mainstage panel at the Crypto Investor Show in London

The KR1 sponsored a stage, which unfortuanetly featured many unconvincing ICOs. Why? Because a lot projects are not native to the space, aren’t solving any technical problems and don’t understand the proper mechanisms for having a token in the first place. Buyers beware!

Keld & KR1 mentioned CoinDesk

So Long ICOs, Hello Airdrops: The Free Token Giveaway Craze Is Here

Nice mention in Coindesk on Airdops

“Ontology just raised a private round and then didn’t need to do a [public] crowdsale, so they just airdropped to eager NEO hodlers,” Keld van Schreven, a partner at blockchain investment company KR1, told CoinDesk.

Coinscrum

We are excited to be sponsoring London’s original blockchain meetup, Coinscrum. It started life as a small meetup in a pub in Paddington quite some years ago and is the daddy of all crypto meetups in London by now.

Gibraltar trip

George and Keld met with key players in Gibraltar as we are founding sponsors (and excited investors) of the Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange, which we’re going to support actively by listing the best of the best crypto projects onto the GBX platform. Watch this space!

The Gibraltar airport is not only one of the shortest in the world but also used as a traffic crossing when not in use!

The Pathfounder: Business of the Blockchain Conference

We curated a full day conference on March 27th in Aldergate, London, organised by Mr. Techcrunch Mike Butcher and Dianne. The great and the good flew in from all over to have a brilliant day talking the state of crypto. This was touted as possibly the best crypto conference, apart from the famous Melonport M-0 conference in October 2017!

KRYPTONIGHT 1 MEETUP in London

Another packed KRYPTONIGHT meetup was in store with three amazing world class projects! Ryan from Foam and Arthur from Dfinity had flown in from America.