WinMiner. Yes, let’s do this again. We just came back from spending a week in Barcelona with this amazing team and are incredibly excited to announce our investment in this industry evolving project! The industry is already picking up on this story with CoinTelegraph, NewsBTC, Bitcoinist and CoinSquare running features!

Let’s look at WinMiner as an independent entity first. At its core WinMiner is a zero barrier to entry onramp into crypto. With an incredibly easy interface (literally used by our mothers!), since being launched last year it had already generated a userbase of well over 190k in its Alpha version. WinMiner has demonstrated the roots to a massively scalable consumer facing application; led by veterans of both ICQ (the first massively successful IM platform) and the first download manager and accelerator (with hundreds of millions of installs), this is a team with clear understanding of product and scale. Let’s look at the road to that scale.

WinMiner is designed to launch with a retail platform, but very quickly expand their breadth of offerings to include professional and industrial miners as well as various alternate ways of monetizing the computing / hashpower that is generated through this diversified userbase. Given the initial retail focus, there are three critical, thoughtful features to the platform that drive adoption:

1. By default, mining proceeds are immediately converted from crypto to fiat in order to keep a user’s balance constantly increasing and divorced from the volatility of crypto. While the fiat option is available and very valuable, there is also the option to be paid out in crypto, which provides a one click, very low cost, method for acquiring crypto. This is very appealing for retail players when set against the complexities of opening an exchange account and funding via a bank.

2. WinMiner has signed partnerships with some extremely interesting software giants both within and outside the crypto space. These giants are very interested in WinMiner as a bridge product into the space and have the potential to drive enormous adoption. The road to scale through these partnerships is real, very near term and well thought through.

3. Retail participants generally lack the ability to select the most profitable coins to mine on a hardware agnostic basis. When the confounding layer of variable hardware specs is mixed in, it becomes almost impossible for all but the most tech-savvy to optimize their unused hardware capacity. WinMiner’s algorithm takes pricing and mining difficulty into account but also layers in varying hardware specifications in choosing which coin to mine ensuring one click optimization with zero background knowledge. The platform also can convert to fiat automatically and will even grow to take local electricity costs into account.

Slightly after retail adoption, the hardware inclusive algorithm model allows more and more powerful users to take advantage of the WinMiner platform. These heavier users provide more scale and therefore better returns to the retail participants and also are better set up to accept crypto as a withdrawal mechanism minimizing conversion costs on the platform. These power users aren’t a pie in the sky dream either WinMiner has already seen certain instances of significant flow of larger scale users move to their platform indicating that these guys are already on the radar for these bigger players! Longer term, WinMiner plans to expand further into a more general hashpower marketplace, which will aim to commoditize computing power for specific use cases and minimize frictions inherent in trading those units. If you didn’t read the operating model post, synergies are our bag, and we’re looking at a bunch of projects that need the decentralized compute resources that WinMiner is bringing to the table.

The token model is a Binance style discount token, which allows users paying with the token to receive a discount on the fees inherent in withdrawing crypto or fiat from the platform. Where the model differs from Binance is twofold

1. Where the discount available to users of Binance tokens eventually reduces to zero, the discount on WinMiner tokens reduces with time but there is some discount perpetually. BORING FINANCE ALERT: Given the “fundamental” value of a discount token is the aggregate amount of fees that can be saved by using them discounted to today, having this perpetual discount allows us to apply a terminal value to the token, which potentially provides additional support to its value.

2. The really game changing difference though is that for the first time ever you can use hashpower on the platform to “mine” a certain amount of these tokens. This means that, similar to how WinMiner has provided one click access to mining, investors can now have one click access to a token sale and participate alongside us and other big investors! This also has the benefits of providing an extremely strong justification for them being a utility token, being a zero barrier to entry method for getting their tokens into the hands of users and providing hash-power to the platform which can be mined and used to support the discount.

Discount tokens have pros and cons and we won’t go through them here, but they are one of relatively better understood token models and one that has seen real world success.

An extremely easy onramp to a complicated, but very profitable new technology that has proven to be wildly popular in the right conditions? A deployment of blockchain technology that works as designed in the current blockchain world, but even better in a more developed blockchain world? A meaningful userbase from an Alpha version created by guys with experience scaling consumer facing apps? Partnerships that place this app an incentivized click away from an enormous pool of potential users? A reasonable token model that has proven utility inherent?

Yes please.

But wait. There’s more. And it’s Aion related.

Luckily for us, this project also has awesome implications for Aion! We’re extremely excited that the WinMiner token launch and business logic will be built and run on top of the Aion platform! The Aion Foundation has been working extremely hard in recent months to increase wallet support, exchange support, tooling support and generally make the ecosystem ready for the WinMiners and Clanplay’s of the world to step in and swing. Well they’re here, and they’re swinging!

In addition to building on Aion, WinMiner will be mining AION in its pools. AION is currently one of the highest yielding GPU chains to mine and so having it included a profitability driven pool with the scale of hash power WinMiner can bring is a meaningful benefit to network security. WinMiner will also be offering AION coins as a withdrawal currency for the platform increasing breadth of holders and also providing a native outlet for coins mined within the platform.

Picture it: millions of people one click deploying a program that generates AION and other cryptocurrency for them for no cost beyond electricity and hardware. The platform leads to AION wallets being generated to hold their Aion based WinMiner token which again is acquired at no cost beyond running your computer. This WinMiner token incentivizes them to transact on the Aion blockchain to withdraw those AION coins and other crypto directly into this AION wallet (we’re trying to pump up our Network Value / Times Mentioning Aion ratio).

Furthermore, as the Aion ecosystem develops, mining won’t be the only activity happening on chain requiring distributed computing power. We’ve seen many layer 2 protocols which require their own compute power to perform tasks within their own protocols. Whether it’s training AIs, proof of location, proof of capacity, proof of (insert buzzword here), these all require resources that WinMiner’s hash power marketplace would be ideally situated to be the provider of choice for.

Finally, our entire investment in WinMiner is done in native AION tokens. We use AION tokens as our functional currency and are deploying them directly into our portfolio companies in their native form. Then we bring to the table a network of over 15 international partners set up to work with our portfolio companies and continue to take AION in its native form (legal, token launch advisory, development, marketing, swag, you name it). Tokens being recycled natively from early stage investors to multiple new participants who are catalyzing the ecosystem all without ever hitting an exchange? It’s the tokenomics dream!

Kesem will be joining the WinMiner advisory board in his role as CEO of Bicameral Ventures and myself and the whole Bicameral team couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with this amazing team and project!!

Alex McDougall

Chief Investment Officer

Bicameral Ventures

About Bicameral Ventures

Bicameral Ventures is an innovative Venture Capital fund which both raises and deploys capital directly in cryptocurrency and invests in early stage projects leveraging the Aion interoperability blockchain platform. Bicameral Ventures was co-founded by Kesem Frank, co-founder of Aion and Nuco Inc. and Alex McDougall, fintech and M&A investment banking veteran with Bank of Montreal Capital Markets.

www.BicameralVentures.com

@BicameralCrypto

@Kesemfr

@AlexM_Bicameral