Crypto should be for everyone. This is Step Zero.
Back in 2017 many people believed that crypto was poised to disrupt everything. Though the potential applications of the tech were inspiring, there were challenges that kept blockchain tech from hitting mainstream: fraud, usability issues, volatility, capital requirements, regulatory uncertainty, among other major concerns. There was also a significant lack of critical infrastructure that makes it much easier for people and companies to interact with and participate in blockchains. Infrastructure is a key component to accelerating innovation in any category, and the best example of this has been servers.
20 years ago internet-based technology companies needed to spend significant capital and resources on servers, network and hardware engineers, and software architecture to build the networks and servers underlying their technology. The rise of AWS in the 2000s abstracted away many of these complexities and allowed companies to utilize Amazon’s web servers to scale their own platforms. This led to the rise of massive technology companies like Airbnb and Uber. Crypto has been missing the fundamental infrastructure to make implementation, security, and architecture easy to access in order to get mass scale adoption and accelerate innovation.
Enter Bison Trails, one of just four crypto startups in the 24-member Libra Association. Bison Trails is a company dedicated to building this critical infrastructure.
On its surface, Bison Trails provides staking services for its customers, which allows them to generate passive income securely through their token holdings. However, at its core Bison Trails is a blockchain infrastructure provider that removes the complexities of launching and deploying participation nodes on any protocol through its simple software interface. In today’s crypto world customers include financial institutions, exchanges, decentralized applications, staking services, and layer-2 protocols who need to run nodes in order to participate in blockchain networks. Nodes are a quintessential part of blockchain technology and allow users to read and write to the blockchain, validate transactions, vote on protocol changes, and more broadly participate in these networks. They are a fundamental piece of infrastructure required in the earlier stages of developing any type of blockchain technology.
Imagine Company A, a packaging manufacturer that services companies across the globe that wants to use distributed ledger technology to replace their current databases and tracking systems to reduce administrative costs and inefficiencies. This would typically require a large team of dedicated engineers to manage the security, infrastructure architecture, and devops to begin testing any potential blockchain use cases. These teams are also limited in their ability to cover a number of different blockchain networks, because all protocols have different underlying architecture and code that are updated regularly. Given these factors, innovation to date in this ecosystem has been fundamentally limited by human capital.
Bison Trails is shifting the paradigm from human capital and hardware scaling to software driven scaling, similar to what AWS back in the 2000s. Now Company A can use Bison Trails’ one-click deploy infrastructure platform to easily launch participation nodes on any number of networks, and maximize its resources to focus on innovation and building. Ultimately we believe this infrastructure makes blockchain technology more accessible for everyone, making it a prerequisite for further innovation and mass adoption in the space.
Sound Ventures believes Bison Trails is tackling a massive problem in a smart and scalable way — by building critical infrastructure that will become the foundation for others’ innovation. We believe they have the best team and platform to succeed, and we are incredibly excited to announce our participation in their Series A. We’re humbled to be joining some incredible investors like Blockchain Capital, Initialized, Coinbase, and Accomplice in this round. If you are interested in staying up to date with the latest happenings with Bison Trails, you can follow their blog here.
