Meet the 16 projects kicking off with the 2018 ConsenSys Tachyon Accelerator program.

About Tachyon

ConsenSys Ventures’ Tachyon program is a 10-week accelerator taking early stage blockchain projects from idea to viable MVP. Sixteen companies from around the world will come together in San Francisco to participate in programming and work on the foundation of their businesses. Projects are placed into one of three tracks: Blockchain project, open source and social impact, and a team of accomplished advisors — coming from both the ConsenSys ecosystem and industry leaders from traditional tech companies — will work directly with each project to help construct a viable roadmap and advise on key design decisions. The program will culminate with a demo day on November 17th, where prominent venture capitals, angel investors and strategic advisors from Silicon Valley and beyond will give the participating startups the opportunity to pitch their companies to potential investors and the tech community at large.

Kavita Gupta (Managing Partner, ConsenSys Ventures):

“We launched Tachyon with the intention of finding extremely promising early-stage companies and providing them with hands on support from the get-go. Among this inaugural group, I feel confident that we’ve found the next crop of game-changing projects that will drive innovation across the blockchain ecosystem. With the programming we’ve put in place and our deep stable of mentors, our mission is to solidify these companies’ foundations and put our cohort in the best possible position to reach their maximum potential over the next 1–3 years.”

Joe Lubin (Founder, ConsenSys):

“One thing that excites me about this first Tachyon cohort is that it demonstrates the degree to which our Ethereum community remains decentralized, even as it continues to grow. In this first batch, I see companies coming from Israel, China, India, Europe, the South Atlantic and Pacific Northwest all coming together to drive innovation beyond their geographical boundaries. I think the Tachyon programming in place is another first for the Ethereum community, as leaders across industries will come together with Ethereum experts to provide a unique perspective on building a company.”

Meet the Companies

BULVRD is a tokenized community mapping app, creating a token economy to incentivize a global social community to create a rich mapping environment. Tapping into Augmented Reality and Machine Learning, BULVRD is creating a hands-free and safer driving experience. Learn more.

Team:

David Hodge, Founder, CEO

Joe Claus, Senior Software Engineer

Decompany is a decentralized knowledge sharing platform coming from Polaris Office team. Polaris office is a product developed by Infraware — a publicly traded company in South Korea. Decompany uses the blockchain technology to incentivize sharing of knowledge, build a reputation system and utilize network effects. Using token economics Decompany enables creators of the most widely used content to be compensated directly and be rewarded the quality of their contents and curations. Learn more.

Team:

Miles Lee, Co-founder, CEO

Chris Lee, Co-founder, CTO

Jay Lee, Co-founder, Senior Developer

Elkrem helps IoT vendors build Ethereum-connected IoT devices easier for faster go to market. Using secure hardware and simple software SDK’s, Elkrem allows IoT devices to interact with Ethereum stack in an efficient and scalable way. When implemented in IoT devices, Elkrem’s technology can disrupt the Blockchain in IoT industry. Learn more.

Team:

Amr Saleh, Co-founder, CEO

Islam Mostafa, Co-founder, CTO

FISSION unlocks smart contract to smart contract communications, aiming to improve developer experience and in turn enabling better user experiences. Just as HTTP Status Codes empowered the API-driven web, FISSION Codes standardizes status codes for more secure, re-usable, and inter-operable smart contracts for Web3. FISSION Translate adds user controlled language translation. Available today on the Ethereum block chain, and powering security tokens, identity standards, and more. The FISSION Suite will continue to grow with FISSION Web Bridge, Interchain, and more. Learn more.

Team:

Brooklyn Zelenka, CEO, Chief Scientist

Boris Mann, Co-founder, Head of Community & Operations

Incubated in Harvard Innovation Lab, Expercoin is a blockchain protocol for building expert networks and talent platforms that are powered by AI. Using blockchain, Expercoin can track and verify the reputation of experts, driving down costs associated with centralized marketplaces. Enterprises that are unable to grow because of scarcity of high-end talent can recruit subject matter experts at scale and build their own specialized networks to perform work and upskill employees. Created by the team that gave us Experfy, the world’s largest on-demand AI consulting marketplace with 30,000 data scientists, the Expercoin protocol was a response to Fortune 500s who wanted to white label Experfy for their specific needs. Expercoin’s vision is to create thousands of decentralized expert platforms with millions of experts, directly addressing the growing skills-gap across verticals. Learn more.

Team:

Harpreet Singh, Co-founder, CEO

Sarabjot Kaur, Co-founder, CMO

FastX is an open layer-2 scalability protocol that enables dapps to have high throughput and instant transactions with the security of Ethereum mainnet. With FastX protocol integration, dapps can substantially improve their user experiences and reach the masses. Learn more.

Team:

Max Weng, Co-founder, CEO

Bing Yang, Co-founder, CTO

GlobalXplorer (Non-profit grant, Social impact track)

GlobalXplorerº is on a mission to protect the world’s hidden heritage. A TED Prize recipient, GlobalXplorerº is a crowdsourced archaeology initiative that allows anyone with an internet connection to participate in archaeology and legitimize findings in their region.

The GXº Blockchain is a global registry for antiquities and an Ethereum-based marketplace for the sustainable distribution of an antiquity’s cultural heritage data which can be curated and collected.

Nations and their heritage institutions will be able to monitor the whereabouts of their antiquities, manage the journeys of these valuable assets through time, and empower citizens to liberate the use of their associated cultural data in all types of digital content, for the greater good of society. Learn more.

Team:

Jennifer Wolf, Director of Design + Development

Chase Childs, Executive Director

Sarah Parcak, GlobalXplorerº Founder

Groundhog is a wallet and payment platform for consumers and merchants that enables e-commerce crypto subscriptions. Groundhog can be called a “Stripe for crypto”, and consists of the Groundhog mobile wallet, a merchant portal, and a payment gateway, Groundhog Pay, that can be installed on any web site via API or plugin. Customer and merchant funds are stored in state-of-the-art, non-custodial smart wallets on Ethereum. Pre-authorized, recurring payments aren’t possible with today’s crypto wallets and payment gateways, and Groundhog is building the technology to enable this huge category of payments for the new world of decentralized finance. Learn more.

Team:

Scott Burke, Co-founder and CEO

Andrew Redden, Co-founder and CTO

Netherstorm is a Delaware based company spinning up decentralized, on-chain software and video games. Their vision is simple: Make digital games publishing cheaper and accessible for everyone. By harnessing the power of the Ethereum blockchain through e.g. non-fungible tokens (ERC721) they are creating an open licensing standard for game licensing, a cost-effective storefront to sell and distribute games and an ecosystem of supporting services. With strong partners from both traditional and blockchain space and by aggressively undercutting their competition, they aim to disrupt the existing ecosystem of digital games distribution. Learn more.

Team:

Maximilian Weber, Founder, CEO

Marco Kaul, Fullstack Developer

Özkan Isik, Designer

Net Ninjas is an Israel based protocol that aggregates decentralized services. Projects can integrate with the Net Ninja’s platform allowing enterprise customers to access them through a cloud and service agnostic API. Starting with a decentralized proxy and video transcoding, Net Ninjas will allow open source projects to run the needed infrastructure for their services in the background of willing participants phones, computers, or GPU’s during underutilized hours and reward them with micropayments. Learn more.

Team:

Rami Hersonsky, Co-founder, CEO

Ohad Cohen, Co-founder, CTO

Isaac Rodgin, Co-founder, COO

Nuo is a Singapore based project decentralizing debt markets by connecting lenders and borrowers. Borrowers on the platform can stake tokens as collateral and borrow or margin trade ETH or ERC20 tokens with leverage. The protocol has already processed $25,000 worth of loans and provides an on-chain lending solution for digital assets. Learn more.

Team:

Varun Deshpande, Co-Founder

Ratnesh Ray, Co-Founder

Siddharth Verma, Co-Founder

Picolo is building decentralized storage infrastructure for blockchains and web 3. It will consist of a data sharing platform powered by nodes running a database like software with features such as complex querying, differential privacy, fine grained access control to data and audits. It will have native support for data sharing between apps and state channels. Ideally, data is encrypted, would never even leave this network and code would ‘come to it’ and perform computations without leaking any info.

Team:

Adi Kancherla, Founder

Arunesh Mishra, Founder

Pulse seeks to become to the Buyer what Salesforce is to Sellers. Pulse is a decentralized agent that is conversational, private, and secure where buyers can express intent, control their data, and find and engage effectively. For sellers, Pulse is a new channel for effective lead generation and nurturing based on trustful conversations. The Pulse protocol seeks to transform digital marketing by creating a smarter way to connect in-market buyers directly with experts and sellers in high-value service industries. Built natively on Web 3 and Blockchain, Pulse confers agency on the buyer while replacing Surveillance with Trust, and the Middle-Man with a Transparent Meritocracy. Learn more.

Team:

Anandan Jayaraman (AJ), Co-founder, CEO

Vamsee Lakamsani, Co-founder, CTO

Quidli is a France-based protocol building the technological infrastructure that makes equity-based employee compensation simple and flexible — with a particular focus today on the startup space. Currently a centralized protocol, integrating an Ethereum-based solution will allow for the tokenization of equity making equity-based compensation programmable and tradeable. Learn more.

Team:

Justin Ahn, Co-founder, CEO

Florent Bolzinger, Co-founder, Product Manager

Gagandeep Singh, Co-founder, Tech Lead

San Francisco based TapTrust is building a self-sovereign wallet that utilizes a standard username and password login and allows users easy set-up without ever needing to back-up a seed phrase. In addition to their wallet offering, TapTrust is incorporating a commercial feature called TrustFund that provides loss protection for smart contract security exploits. The loss protection offered with TrustFund along with the ease of setup for the TapTrust wallet should make it easy for people to get started with using dapps without the major risk factor of losing their crypto. Learn more.

Team:

James Levy, CEO

WalletConnect (Open Source Grant)

WalletConnect is a simple solution that bridges communication between browser-based dapps and mobile wallets using a QR code scan to establish the initial connection. It is an open protocol and does not require a dApp user to install a browser extension. The protocol is agnostic to specific mobile wallets a user may want to use and will enable dApp developers to integrate with multiple wallets and reach users through a single implementation. Learn more.

Team:

Pedro Gomes, Founder, and Lead Developer

We’re looking forward to the weeks ahead as these companies grow, iterate, and evolve. Interested in keeping up with the progress of these Tachyon projects? Follow ConsenSys Ventures for future updates.