KR1 September Update 🌰

Moonbeam, Half-year Results, Portfolio News

4 min readOct 16, 2020

Moonbeam Investment

We were delighted to participate in Moonbeam investment round alongside Hypersphere Capital and HashKey Group in September. Moonbeam is an Ethereum compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network and is a new, powerful, scalable blockchain that makes it easy to build interoperable decentralised applications (“dApps”) that can integrate and run in parallel with other blockchains, including Ethereum and Bitcoin. The Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Ethereum smart
contracts to Moonbeam with minimal changes. As a Polkadot ‘Parachain’,
Moonbeam will benefit from the shared security of Polkadot and integrations
with other chains that are connected to Polkadot.

Moonbeam is being led by Derek Yoo and his experienced team at PureStake, who provide the protocol implementation for Moonbeam. The project is currently in active development and is expected to reach mainnet by mid-2021.

Derek Yoo, CEO of PureStake and Founder of Moonbeam, commented:

“KR1 has a strong track record of investing in Web3 technology that moves the industry forward, from Ethereum and Polkadot’s early days to the DAOs and DeFi platforms emerging today. We’re happy to join their portfolio of investments and welcome their valuable insight as we continue to build and grow the Moonbeam smart contract platform to deliver Ethereum interoperability and compatibility with Polkadot.”

Keld van Schreven, Managing Director and Co-Founder of KR1, commented:

“We’ve seen incredible growth in smart contracts on Ethereum and now, with the launch of Moonbeam, we expect to see high growth rates and developer engagement. Moonbeam represents the best of all the learning of Ethereum smart contracts on a super quick secure blockchain built within Polkadot. The potential for powerful new types of new DeFi applications and services is really limitless. Derek is an experienced hand steering the ship and we have great faith in him and his team.”

KR1: Half-year Report and Results

“Throughout the period we continued to invest in high quality projects focused on disruption and innovation. Looking back at this difficult period it’s clear, investing through these bleakest of times can produce some of the best investment opportunities and returns, witnessed by new funding rounds and the solid progress these projects are making. Only the teams with the highest conviction and tenacity are able to innovate during these times. Valuations are often fairer, rather than the frothy raises seen in bull markets, as projects vie for funds from tighter venture capital purses.
We have continued to generate steady income from our position in the Cosmos network. The native ATOM staking yields in this H1 period to 30 June 2020 accrued to a lower GBP equivalent revenue figure than previous periods due to depressed market conditions in the earlier half of the year. However, with the markets improving over the summer months our strategy to realise staking yields at the best possible prices proved successful once again, resulting in higher realised prices than the daily prices of when staking rewards were generated. Our reputation and brand within the digital asset ecosystem strengthen daily as we fund evermore important and respected projects. With so many of our investments from previous years now tradable and considerably more valuable, not only has our balance sheet grown, but it has also become far more liquid. This means that portfolio management becomes an ever more important aspect for KR1 as some positions become very valuable. Maximising returns, whether through staking yield bearing assets, realizing profits through sales, or by utilizing these assets as security collateral for new crypto networks in terms of ‘Lockdrops’ or ‘Stakedrops’, has become a new priority in our portfolio management.
KR1 is a public stock on London’s AQSE Growth Market (KR1: AQSE), which was previously the NEX Exchange. Aquis Exchange plc recently acquired NEX Exchange with the intention of making improvements to the exchange infrastructure in regards to electronic trading, higher volumes, deeper liquidity and allowing for a more global investor base. We are looking forward to seeing how the new Aquis Exchange team implements their plans for improving the legacy NEX Exchange over the months to come.”

George McDonaugh and Keld van Schreven, KR1 plc

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KR1 is Europe’s leading digital asset investment company supporting early-stage decentralised and open-source blockchain and DeFi projects. Founded in 2016, KR1 has been a notable first investor in many key projects that will power the decentralised crypto assets, platforms and protocols that form the emerging Web3 infrastructure.

In the spirit of the open and decentralised movement, any individual or institution can buy publicly-listed KR1 shares through the London-based AQSE stock exchange (previously NEX Exchange).