Source: iStock/Olivier Le Moal

The Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator, a joint venture by major organizations on the UC Berkeley campus, public research university in California, U.S., has selected its top projects for its third blockchain Xcelerator batch – the largest yet.

The Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator is a joint venture among the university’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, Blockchain at Berkeley, and the Haas School of Business. UC Berkeley announced the launch of a blockchain-focused accelerator back in January 2019, with the goal to provide support for early-stage blockchain projects through necessary resources and connections with industry experts.

It has published the list of 17 projects selected for the highly desirable Spring 2020 cohort, out of 140 applied startups, says the announcement. These startups will now have a chance to work with Berkeley’s faculty, mentors, researchers, faculty, and students, as well as venture capital firms, thus both learning from them and making contacts within the network and possibly beyond.

The selected teams come from across industries, including gaming, fintech, IoT, sports, energy, and healthcare:

Acala: decentralized finance consortium that wants to create a cross-chain open finance infrastructure for the Polkadot ecosystem; ARterra: a fan engagement platform built on the NEAR Protocol, which gives sports franchises, eSports, teams and streamers an opportunity for engagement and revenue; Blockstar Building: a marketplace for exclusive brands to offer branded virtual goods for purchase, rent and usage, which connects to video games, VR experiences, social networks and messaging apps; Blok-z: a white-label solution to verify the production, trading, tracking and consumption of electricity all on one platform with end-to-end certification of electricity origin; Calypso: a reverse auction site that enables borrowers to create personalized loan proposals, enabling lender competition; Cowri: a network that works on solving the future infrastructure interoperability problem, and it allows efficient exchange of stablecoins; Finoa: an EU-licensed custody and asset-servicing solutions for institutional investors, corporations, and high-net-worth individuals; GVOS.io: an edge cloud using distributed storage and proprietary technologies to help create, store, distribute, and monetize HD maps for autonomous driving; Linkdrop: a Web3 marketing platform used by crypto projects and wallets to generate and distribute onboarding links including digital assets via a link, SMS, email, etc. Liquid Mortgage: a digital asset platform that creates loan-level digital assets and enables the transfer of borrower funds to investors; Nodle.io: builder of the world’s largest wireless network to connect and secure the Internet of Things atop the global smartphone infrastructure; Nugbase: an Ethereum-based farming MMO (massively multiplayer online) game; OPGames: a suite of tools that helps game developers add e-sports-like tournaments to their single-player games and allows players to earn crypto payouts; Sixtant: a proprietary high-frequency trading system for market making and liquidity services in crypto with banking relationships; Snark Health: a platform that connects patients, doctors, insurers and donors for health care services, private data sharing and payments; Snowball Money: a smart crypto investment automation platform; Stake Technologies: a scalable infrastructure for Web3.0 via their new Plasm Network – a Polkadot Parachain and dapps (decentralized apps) platform, enabling smart contract functionality.

The joint venture welcomed its first group of teams in March 2019, which was made of 12 projects (AnChain.ai, Bitmark, DataAgora, Dyson Network, FourthState Labs, Insolar.io, PlayTable, Source, SWFT Pay, TruSource, Vinc, and zkSystems).

For the Fall 2019 cohort, the Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator picked 13 teams (BCdiploma, Bounty0X, CINCEL, COIN, Eluvio, KryptoGO, Leaf Global Fintech, MtHash, Nickel, Pinata, Puma Browser, RIPchain, and Sheeld Market).

This latest cohort brings the total number of teams to 42.

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