In the Bluzelle ecosystem, blockchain platforms play integral role. They are a way for us to get more customers to use the our decentralized database. Thus far as Bluzelle Lovelace pointed out, we have integrations into Ethereum and NEO. We have previously announced working with Zilliqa and their high throughput blockchain. Our goal is to become the defacto database service for all blockchain platforms.

As part of our Phase One (which ended June 30) we are happy to announce three more partnerships with blockchain platforms. All three are blockchain world leaders building up large support. These are:

ICON: Building a decentralized network that allows blockchains with different governances to transact with one another without intermediaries.

QTUM: Like a hybrid of Bitcoin and Ethereum, a value transfer protocol which can support dapps and smart contracts.

Wanchain: Wanchain is working to use its cross-chain technology and privacy features to safely connect and exchange value between all of the world’s different blockchains, starting with Ethereum.

It’s been a pleasure to know these teams for almost a year. I got to know Patrick (QTUM), Henry (ICON) and Jack (Wanchain) well in advance of our ICO and we formed relationships while our respective technologies advanced.

The Bluzelle development team is excited to be working on these platforms as they solve major challenges and open us up to interesting dApps to use Bluzelle. We’re currently in China presenting alongside these teams at various Bluzelle: New Data Economy events.

Phase One Recap

It’s been almost 6 months since our ICO and in addition to these partnerships, I want to give the community an update on other sides of the business

The objectives of Phase One were:

To establish the Bluzelle Decentralized Database (Bluzelle DB)as a major problem solver

To raise funding through an ICO to deliver our vision

To deliver the testnet of the Bluzelle DB and lay the foundation for our future

To become thought leaders in pushing decentralized infrastructure

We accomplished all the above as you will see from below.

Funding

On January 18 we successfully executed a $19.5M USD token sale with over 7,500 participants. We had over 95% of the KYC’d people come on participate. This was a massive number as most tokens sales get less than 70% turn out.

Team Size

Before the ICO we were at 7 people. We have now grown to 15, a nice and manageable growth rate. Sometimes when you hire too fast it impedes progress, too many people in the kitchen and everyone keeps bumping into each other.

The majority of our hires were in engineering and two standouts are:

Andrew Mastracci, head of product development, who raised $35M for his prior company, Pertino Networks, which was acquired by Cradlepoint.

Isabel Scroggin, heading up research, who has a masters in Computer Science and worked at both NASA and AWS.

We also added two new advisors, Daniel Saito and Colin Charles, who both worked at building up the open-source communities for MySQL and MariaDB — two of the biggest databases in the world.

Partnerships

As an infrastructure marketplace, we are able to create an ecosystem of buyers and sellers. Buyers represent those that want to store their data through Bluzelle. Sellers represent those that offer their storage space on Bluzelle and earn BLZ. We also have a third group, blockchain platforms, which are distribution points that bring us more buyers.

Currently we have:

Over 30 dApp projects: these are specific blockchain use cases our team works with directly to identify needs and more. This group includes 0x, Sentinel, NuCypher, GlobalID amongst many others. With Lovelace out, we expect more and more.

3 Strategic Partnerships: We’re working with Microsoft and British Telecom (BT) on the supply side. They are providing us with nodes for our database. This shows that we have a high standard and resilient system that both dApp and non-blockchain applications can benefit from. We also were accepted into the Blockchain-AI program by JD.com — one of the world’s leading e-commerce companies who have been investing into emerging technologies.

Marketing & Community Building

As most aware, we have been relentless since August 2017 in getting our message across. We always focused on three things: product, team and technology. Here is a recap of all our marketing efforts for Phase One:

60+ Live Events: These included speaking at major conferences such as Token 2049, Blockshow Asia, Viet Nam Blockchain week, ETHereal and more. These took place in over 20 cities including New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, Tokyo, Stockholm, London, Singapore. We also held 2 hackathons which yield more use cases and helped in recruiting new people.

90+ Press Coverage: Our message seems to have resonated well as we were covered by major mainstream media like CNBC, Forbes, Bloomberg. This is on top of the crypto news sites like Coindesk, Cointelegraph. And we have to give special attention to all the podcasters, bloggers, and ICO sites that took time to speak to us help raise awareness.

100,000 + Community: Aside from getting funding, the biggest benefit for doing an ICO is building a community that is ready to help promote the company and product. We have been fortunate to build 100,000 + following across Telegram, email, Twitter and more. I still remember last October when we broke 500 people on Telegram. A big thank you for those who are part of this and continue to tune in for our AMAs, Live Twitter Streams and more.

As Phase One has ended, our next posts will be about Phase Two: Building the New Data Economy. This is kicking off with our China tour this week. I look forward to giving you the new materials for Phase Two.