Æternity Ventures, the VC arm of blockchain 3.0 project æternity, has just chosen four early-stage projects to back. These are the Croatian Cryptotask, the Maltese-Serbian Cryptic Legends, Abend from Germany, and the Bulgarian HomePort. All four finalists are working on solutions far beyond the cryptocurrency dimension of the blockchain technology.

The young companies have all gone through the second edition of æternity’s accelerator Startfleet, and will now enter negotiations for funding, conditions, and further collaboration. At the beginning of the program in March the blockchain accelerator stated they could offer up to $100K in AE tokens and services per startup.

The new generation of decentralization

Talent market, gaming, events, satellite communication – these are the fields the four chosen teams want to disrupt putting processes on the blockchain. Three of the startups are aiming to develop marketplaces to decentralize them. All four business models are currently based on transaction fees.

Ground Stations & Satellites

The only Bulgarian startup in this batch is HomePort, a ground-station-as-a-service platform. CEO Zdravko Dimitrov describes it as a decentralized marketplace for ground station capacity, which operators of satellites or satellite constellations in space can use to maximize the output of their fleet. HomePort aims to remove intermediaries and thus decrease the tax fees they charge from satellite operators and stations, on the one hand. On the other, the company would allow its customers to optimize data session scheduling between the stations and the satellites. According to Dimitrov, the project has already attracted interest from some satellite companies.

Freelance services

The Croatian Cryptotask is a decentralized task-oriented freelancing market looking to meddle the current systems via blockchain. The startup is aiming to enter the trillion dollars freelancing industry and seeks to solve the problem with large fees for both freelancers and employers, limited task size values and biased disputes. One key innovation it introduces is a dispute mechanism. Moreover, it won’t put limits on the freelancing tasks, no censorship, and meager fees (around 3%), whereas competitors solutions charge both freelancers and employers up to 30%, CEO Ivan Nanut shared.

Events

The German Abend wants to be an open community governed ticketing platform that allows cashless, secure on-site payments based on æternity blockchain. It would enable the festivals and parties organizers to ditch the plastic tokens and to provide a faster, verifiable and secure ticket sale. This way they solve the issue with the lack of trust in the ticketing system problem. The market valuation worldwide for festival and events is 35 billion euro, CEO Tim Betzin shared with the audience. The company would charge 2.5 % of each transaction through its system.

+++ Bulgarian Evedo is also planning to put the event industry on the block, and has launched a test version +++

Gaming

Cryptic Legends is bringing blockchain into the gaming world. In its core, the Maltese-Serbian team offers a collectible card game, where players can have your legends/heroes independently from developers. The creators describe it as a “mix of football manager, game of thrones and trading card games.” Apart from selling the heroes directly to the players, Cryptic Legends will provide the option for trading heroes between players and charge a 4% transaction fee.

+++ Tokenization in the Gaming Industry? +++

Portfolio is growing

The whole acceleration program is part of æternity’s strategy to catalyze an ecosystem of applications for its blockchain platform. Since æternity raised $35М in 2017, it has been focused on developing a secure infrastructure that would allow diverse decentralized applications to be built on it. Even though æternity also has an internal application development unit and several products in the pipeline, the company is looking to involve a larger community in the development process.

Last July, at the end of the first season of Startfleet, nine companies were chosen to receive in total $1.3M of funding. Even though the main operations of Startfleet and Aeternity Ventures are in Bulgaria, the program is open to everyone from everywhere. Тhree of the eight companies from the Startfleet 2018 batch were from Bulgaria – Tradex Social, weiDex and Noble Hire. Noble Hire has just launched its first version of its product – a job board and hiring platform based on referrals.