San Francisco, CA (June 21, 2018) – Bluehill, a blockchain incubator and accelerator, officially launched today to support partnership projects, DApp development and blockchain technology innovations within the IOST ecosystem.

Following a successful new raise of $50 million in funding, Bluehill aims to provide crucial backing for IOST industry partnerships, as well as for projects built within the IOST ecosystem. Bluehill was established to support the growing interest from developers and entrepreneurs in the IOST blockchain. The backing of a well-funded incubator/accelerator will position the IOST network to compete for developer attention with top tier blockchain platforms like Ethereum.

“We’ve seen an upswell of interest from blockchain ecosystem developers looking to partner with the IOST network as well as from DApp teams looking to develop on top of it. We will be creating a highly supportive ecosystem to accelerate the most promising projects and strengthen the entire IOST network.” – Samantha Wang, Bluehill CEO

Bluehill has already established a team of over 50 full time staff with plans to reach 100 employees by the end of the year. They have offices in China, Korea, Singapore and are currently finalizing incorporation in the United States and Germany, as well as plans to launch more offices globally in the near future. They will work closely to support teams both developing on and improving the IOST network by providing services including funding, operations, marketing, HR, recruitment, advisorship and industry partners. With its aggressive global expansion plan, Bluehill appears set to leave its mark on the blockchain ecosystem.

In the future Bluehill and IOST plan to collaborate to launch projects in order to emulate the rapid expansion of blockchain technology supported by the Ethereum ecosystem over the last year.

Bluehill has already announced partnerships with 7 highly promising projects that are developing blockchain solutions for cybersecurity, payment processing and content distribution:

Certik

Certik is committed to reconstructing the trust of smart contracts and blockchains through world-leading formal verification technology. CertiK can detect the security loopholes of open source code and ensure the security before the smart contract is released. CertiK features an elite team from Yale University, Columbia University, and Silicon Valley including Co-founder Shao Zhong, Dean of the Department of Computer Science at Yale University with more than 20 years of experience in the security field.

CertiK will explore IOST mainchain smart contract validation services in order to ensure the security of smart contracts and the overall blockchain system, avoid bugs for on-chain transactions and secure the system from exploits by hackers.

ContentBox

ContentBox currently ranks first in it’s Google Play category and boasts over 16 million users. With its management team has previous experience from leading companies such as Google and Facebook, ContentBox project is building a blockchain architecture for the digital content industry, challenging traditional content giants such as Netflix and YouTube, and creating global decentralized digital content ecosystem. Because content consumption and payment scenarios must be high-frequency, instant, and complex.

ContentBox intends to form an in-depth strategic partnership with IOST to explore how it can ensure security and support the expansion of the basic public chain. Bluehill will facilitate their transition onto IOST.

Origo

Origo is an extensible privacy protection platform for decentralized applications. It extends zero-knowledge proof technology to the input and output of smart contract applications, expanding the scope of privacy protection to encompass every aspect of smart contracts. Its core technology includes the Origo compiler, which can automatically generate cryptographic protocols, allowing developers to build privacy-protected smart contracts and applications without cryptography. Origo’s core team comes from Tsinghua University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, and tech giants including Google, IBM and Pinterest.

Origo will improve the privacy protection policies of DApp’s built on the IOST blockchain and provide security for the transmission and storage of communications, data and value.

Rate3

Rate3 is establishing an ecosystem for secure and efficient cross-border payments. Rate3 will also build a simpler infrastructure for trustworthy e-commerce relationships, facilitate the transfer of funds between merchants and consumers, and establish a reliable credit scoring system for traditional lenders and capital providers. The core team hails from Stanford University and the National University of Singapore. The team previously successfully built the RateX and RateS e-commerce products, which saved more than $200,000 in cross-border payments and over provided over $500,000 in discounts for 150,000 users. Currently it has cooperated with several well-known e-commerce platforms, including Taobao, Amazon, and Singapore e-commerce.

Rate3 will be based on the IOST chain, creating a new e-commerce system with low transaction costs, efficient operation, and distributed redemption functions.

Lambda

Lambda is a blockchain infrastructure designed to provide unlimited storage as a service for decentralized applications, multi-chain data storage, cross-chain data management, data privacy protection, user data, ownership verification, and distributed intelligent computing. Lambda uses sharding and sub-chain tech to greatly enhance system scalability, and is a future-oriented data service. Lambda’s core team has extensive open source project development experience including on several Apache projects such as Camel, Akka, Drill, etc. The Lambda team is mostly composed of former OneAPM employees, a well-known APM SaaS company. The OneAPM system can process every day at its peak. 100 billion data.

Lambda will work with IOST to reduce the risk of data loss, reduce storage and bandwidth costs, and provide content-addressable, peer-to-peer distributed storage and transmission protocols that enable users to create faster, more secure and lower cost data services.

Covalent

Covalent is a privacy-protected data network that utilizes a decentralized computing network to ensure that data is encrypted at all times. Covalent team members hail from leading universities including Harvard, Princeton, and MIT, and possess extensive research and industry experience in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Covalent core technologies include the Covalent virtual machines, Covalent security domains, and Covalent X (the application of zk-STARK and homomorphic encryption cryptography). These technologies coalesce to guarantee data privacy. Covalent Networks will also set up a data exchange platform that allows users to run Al/ML models on encrypted data without worrying about the privacy of the data. Covalent will collaborate with IOST to explore the application of privacy protection technologies such as Enclave, zk-STARK, and Homomorphic Encryption to create a privacy focused decentralized data network.

Plair

Plair is a blockchain-based game platform committed to bringing the virtual gaming experience of eSports to a sustainable development ecosystem. Players can interact, play, watch or discuss games all on the Plair platform. Plair will measure the value of the participants, and reward those who contribute to the platform, motivating participants to create value in game. Plair will feature community management systems, social tools, artificial intelligence cross-platform matching and other analysis tools to build a blockchain-based game ecosystem platform. The Plair CEO founded a number of technology companies and has previously worked at Dell and EMC. The team includes e-pro gamers and e-sports club managers.

With IOST, Plair will explore the efficient blockchain network and its high-speed virtual machine to better support blockchain functionality for high-performance games.