KR1 Year-end 2017 Audited Results
We released our annual year end 2017 results and they were a very solid result for us and our investors. KR1 must be one of the top performing funds of 2017.
First, a statement from George on the 2017 results:
This has been a very good year for the Company. We have taken full advantage of being the first quoted investment company in the world, focussed on blockchain, in particular tokens and have created a track record of successful token investments in the industry. The management team are proud of what has been achieved and we will build on this strong foundation to ensure we continue to be a major player in this fast paced and exciting space. (…)
Overall, the Company is in the very early stages both in terms of technology and adoption. However, with the token economy allowing for near instant liquidity, our ability to back projects at a significantly accelerated speed puts us in a great position to capture the huge future growth potential that this sector has. Suffice to say there is a volatile yet exciting road ahead and we look forward to future developments — \
Next, a summary of the 2017 numbers:
Income 16,281,510 GBPProfit/(loss) for the year 11,610,504 GBPNet Current Assets: 13,551,577 GBPCash at bank and on trading platforms: 1,037,719 GBP
Full KR1 2017 results here.
EDCON Toronto
KR1 sponsored the second EDCON in Toronto, Canada between in early May. It was like having our entire twitter feed collectively gathering in a single venue. Everyone was there, the full contingent of Ethereum developers, the Cosmos team and representatives from Status, ConsenSys, Akasha, Parity, Kenetic and more. Three days of tech, scaling, innovation and networking combined with vibrant after parties. Watch most presentations via their website, just scroll down to ‘Agenda’ and you can see what’s been discussed.
Its truly amazing how the developer conferences go under the radar, while it’s the crucible of everything that’s happening and yet only a week later more than 8,000 people turn up in New York making lots of non-sense noise and trying to get an audience with people they could have sat down for lunch with the week before. Even more surprisingly is how understated these community-led events are, there wasn’t any Lambo in sight, no fireworks, no models handing out flyers. It’s clear there are two sides to this space and they’re diverging at an ever increasing rate. Needless to say we are looking forward to Ethereum’s Devcon 4 in Prague.
GBX Gibraltar Sponsor
KR1 is a founding sponsor of the Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange and was at the first GBX Sponsor Summit in May working through the policies and issues facing listings.
New York Blockchain Week aka ‘Crypto Madness’
As mentioned above, the New York Blockchain week is the biggest week in crypto with three back to back events including Ethereal, Consensys and Token Summit. 8,500 of corporate ‘blockchain for business suits’ were at Consensus 2018 gathering around the Hilton Hotel, very overwhelming and low signal to noise ratio!
Ethereal and Token Summit, however, were more focused on developers and products, the real stuff!
Apart from that, there were several amazing product and developer focused meetups through the whole period, we were especially excited about and privileged to attend these:
FOAM’s Token Curation Markets Meetup
Ethereum Evening Event #EEE
This was held immediately after Token Summit (hosted by the Cosmos team and the Ethereum Community Fund). Lot’s of amazing minds from amazing projects joined the boat including the FOAM team, OmiseGo, Status, Golem, BloXroute, Hoard and many others!
TechCrunch Startup Battlefield #VivaTech
Keld judged the finalists stage at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield in Paris. TC was part of the huge VivaTech conference, which was France’s largest-ever tech conference and hosted the President, Emmanuel Macron, as well as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who was onstage just before Keld and the other judges. The battlefield had 2,000 in the audience, 100,000 watching the livestream and about 750,000 watched it after. A huge event! Techcrunch is delivering high drilled, high production value, global generalist tech startup shows including Web 2, Enterprise, AI and Blockchain. The Startup Battlefield’s winner was Wingly, a flightsharing marketplace for private planes like Uber pool (imagine selecting ‘Rockstar mode’ someday soon on Skyscanner) and the runner up became blockchain startup IOV, which is a crypto project solving token swaps in a secure wallet as well as a naming service.
Read more about the final here: And the winner of Startup Battlefield Europe at VivaTech is… Wingly
Watch the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield livestream here.
Blockshow Europe in Berlin
George went to Blockshow in Berlin to be a jury member for the Blockshow Oscar awards. Eleven blockchain startups vying it out to win $50,000. The organisation of the event was impeccable, plenty of interesting people and a great atmosphere but it lacked the quality of projects we’d liked to have seen.
Nothing in the Oscar line-up stood out and the winner — Shelf.Network, an auction protocol with cars as its initial use case, got the trophy mainly due to having a working product and a revenue stream. We’re privileged at KR1 to get access to fantastic projects, but even our second tier ‘almost’ projects solve bigger problems and will be more disruptive than this. We liked the premise behind Givebytes, a protocol that allows people to give over their computer’s mining power as a way of donating to causes, but we struggle to imagine large enough numbers opting to donate in this way. Perhaps in far off future world. We’d be happy to attend again, but if ICO pitches are put front and centre of the agenda, skilled curation must be front and centre too.
What’s next?
KR1 will be at The Europas in London, George is featured on a panel. They are handing out awards for multiple categories, in case you like what we’ve been up to over the past year, please vote for us here (Category: Hottest Blockchain Investor). Thanks!
MoneyX in Dublin — Keld will be on two panels discussing blockchain security and investing.
We will hope to release more exciting news in June!
Stay tuned.
