Who did we select for the 2nd phase of Starfleet 3?

The Genesis Week is over and we chose 10 startups to continue

Published in

AE Ventures

11 min readNov 11, 2019

For this edition of Starfleet, we wanted to make something special… something out of the beaten track. Challenging but worth it!

As to begin with, we decided we will do it in Malta! Firstly, because it is the Blockchain Island, after all, and secondly, because we partnered up with the Microsoft Innovation Center!

We also visited, sponsored and supported the organization of conferences and hackathons, where we screened blockchain startups. We organized an epic European roadtrip where we visited 15 cities, scouting startups and meeting the local ecosystem. We included æternity’s æmbassadors global network in the process and as a result of all these efforts, we received submissions from more than 100 cities around the world!

After interviewing them all, we selected 15 blockchain startups and invited them to come on board of Starfleet Malta. In the first stage of the accelerator — the Genesis week, all teams went through a hyper-intensive week-long training. Some of the teams joined us onsite at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Malta, some decided to do the boot camp entirely online, others had representatives on both sides — online and onsite.

The Genesis Week laid the foundations every blockchain startup needs in order to define, develop, deploy, and promote its blockchain project.

So, you want to know who is going to compete for funding and 6 months of mentoring? Read on.

1. Real Fund

In essence, the Spanish project is connecting the Real Estate developers with retail investors through tokenized loans.

They are solving the problem of the lack of funding for the small real estate developers and negative interest rates in the market for investors.

The idea is to democratize real estate funding, allowing all kind of real estate developers (meaning, the people who are encompassing activities that range from the purchase of raw land and the sale of developed land or parcels to others, builders and constructors) to get accessible funding out of the traditional channels.

By fractioning debt (like crowdlending) and creating security tokens (STO) on blockchain, Real Fund provides the small investors (who are usually out edged from the market due to the big amount of money required to invest) with the chance to enter in a profitable market and to exit faster and easier, if they want to, by using fractionally tokenized debt.

The Real Fund will issue STO for each one of the new projects of the real estate developers. These tokens will be a digital representation of the value of the loan agreement and they will be tradable on a secondary market. This will increase the transparency, the value, and the liquidity for both — real estate developers and investors.

About the team: a balanced mixture of an expert in international legal compliance, a blockchain architect and a real estate specialist.

2. Cannomy

Aims to give the cannabis economy back to its own community.

They are helping to create and sustain a truly decentralized Cannabis Economy, hence the name — Cannomy.

Their mission is to help new and emerging cannabis ventures, held back by obscure regulations and lack of financial infrastructure to source funding using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Moreover, they will help the tokenized companies to set up and run their operations. Their platform companies will be also able to digitally manage shareholders, issue their share digitally and interact and communicate with their shareholders

Think of this as Kickstarter for cannabis ventures.

The best part is that retail investors will have the opportunity to invest and become shareholders in promising cannabis ventures.

No one has done or tried before to set up a decentralized crowdfunding platform for European cannabis ventures. And Europe’s cannabis market alone is estimated to reach 123 bln EURO by 2028.

3. Sesame

They are building a platform that makes sure that the drivers will have access to more parking options in high-density urban areas. Cities are full of cars and generally, the only free parking places are private.

Their one-click access app which opens any parking barrier which helps the drivers to find easily parking spot and help the parking/building owners to monetize. Think of it as an Airbnb for car parking spots. They are using technology developed for the past 5 years and a device that can be easily installed on any barrier. Once the job is done no need for parking tickets or parking access cards — everything will be operated from the app.

The Sesame team is aiming at big businesses — corporate buildings, residential areas, and hotels and shopping centers, that have private authorization for access. They have already developed a prototype for 4 barriers in one residential area and now closing a deal for an office building with 400 users.

The next steps are building a simple trustless and flexible parking network that would allow onboarding of new parking owners and implementing the P2P strategy for parking lending where private parking spot owners can rent their property for the time they won’t need it.

4. Gametribez

Building a community of crypto game players and crypto game developers!

Gametribez is a decentralized marketplace for video games where you can search, filter and find video games you like, and buy them. Think of is as the YouTube for video games, but with even MORE control in the hands of the people.

The platform will give the chance to any indie game developers to upload a video game.

You might also consider that gaming is the biggest industry in the entertainment sector, so any platform that is community-driven and offers the freedom to develop, upload, earn and play the games you like will be definitely becoming “the thing”.

5. Comunitaria

The name means “super neighbor ” and the idea behind is simple — inforcing positive behavior with incentives.

The project is providing online services to Homeowners Associations (HOAs) — fractional owners of buildings, sharing common services like lift, cleaning, maintenance, but they don’t have a landlord, so they have to manage themselves.

Some of the services their app already provides are instant AI pricing for repairs, access to accountant information, a chatbot to legal information (in case you wonder if you can close the balcony…)

Interesting fact: the Communitaria’s Smart Community Brain, a hardware device, connected to their SaaS, registering smart metrics, smart energy, preventative maintenance, etc., has won an award from the European H20202 Contests for blockchain technology for SMEs.

The team is ready to Integrate æternity Blockchain on the existing SaaS with 9000 leads ready to try those incentives and growing with 2000 more per month.

6. King Football

The solution — an app that can help you identify with one click if an item is fake or original. Basically, the whole technology behind is simple. The KingFootball will chip all the items and make them easily tracible and works like magic.

One huge advantage of the project is the involvement of Dimitar Berbatov. They have at the moment 14 series of Berbatov’s painted by himself items live on æternity blockchain. This is basically a security that is a limited edition, original, certified and tracible.

But there is more to it! Fans want to connect! So what they did was an additional layer on top, that would allow fans to get personalized messages from their favorite football star.

Once a fan gets his item, he can transfer their original items to another person, which creates an enormous secondary market opportunity.

7. Assetify

They are offering a turn-key solution to enable lending institutions to provide credits to customers and use digital assets such as cryptocurrency as collateral.

Crypto backed loan works like a standard loan — you need money you then offer your assets as collateral provided to the lander, lander gives you liquidity and then after you repay your debt the lander is going to return your assets. Maybe. This system requires trust.

Assetify is a b2b platform enabling businesses to start providing crypto-backed loans. Much cheaper and you are bearing less than 10% of the risk.

Here is a simplified process description:

When a user requests a loan the lender approves the loan and the platform creates a deposit in multisig (multi-signature) wallet. When a user deposits funds in the multi-sig wallet the lender provides the loan. When the user executes the last loan payment the lender provides a clearance for deposit withdraw. The user can then provide an address for deposit and the platform sends funds to the users’ withdraw address.

In case of borrower fails to repay the debt the platform will use Bailiff reviewing the requests and decide if the collateral should be liquidated. If the request is approved Assetify signs transaction for liquidation.

They have validated the concept through selling the product and they have 2 paying customers — one bank in Switzerland and one lander in Bulgaria.

The team is aiming at the European Market, planning on penetration in Lichtenstein soon, as the government there signed a bill to digitalize all government assets by 2022. Assetify is going to provide support for all government bonds and digital assets. Their MVP is expected in January 2020.

8. SmartCredit

Every lender will become a bank and every holder will receive in interest.

People were lending and borrowing money for more than 5000 years and this is the backbone of our economy. Commercial banks are creating credit money and 90% of the money today is credit-money — money the lender is using as a debt obligation to a 3rd party and as mean of payment or tradable asset.

This money is missing in the crypto space, but the SmartCredit idea is to create it via decentralized lending!

So how is the transferable tokenized credit working?

On one side, for the borrower there will be 2-click consumer credits, also called money on demand. On the other side, for the lenders providing credit tokenization, credit transferability and interest-bearing to holder. There are also private fixed-income funds for investors, which is basically passive income. All this is integrated through SmartCredit’s API.

First customers will be wallets and wallet providers, next are crypto exchanges, and crypto banks.

At the moment the current system is only working with cryptocurrencies. They are integrating Sophia bridge so they can convert from crypto to fiat, this will be done in the backlog with the integration partner.

9. Colocals

A platform that helps local businesses to thrive. Localization as opposed to globalization — local is the new global and attention and care become a commodity!

About 70% of the local businesses shut down within 3 years because of some of the following is missing: the business was not a good fit for this local area, did not promote themselves, lack of funding, not managing to create or maintain loyal customers. For small businesses is hard to manage all this because they don’t have the resources to pay for business services and they have to do all this by themselves.

So Colocals are creating a platform that connects local businesses directly with local people. It basically is a tool for stable and sustainable development for businesses and an app for the local people to use and make their areas better.

On one hand the businesses can make use of the tool to get crowdfunding and also to get relevant feedback, for example, for what is needed in this area — cafe, a restaurant, yoga studio, etc., and in addition, and can co-create with locals using their suggestions for design or promotion, for instance, or reserve a service or make an appointment, .

On the other hand, the app will reward the local people for their time and ideas, it will collect all the info about the local area in one place, and more importantly, will gallow themto co-create a local business and get dividends if they participate in the crowdfunding. And all this is made possible thanks to blockchain and smart contracts. Their plan is to onboard local businesses and then involve the community promoting STO and decentralized expansion.

By asking, engaging and rewarding the community the local businesses will be able to build a successful business and make more happy customers.

10. CrowdClick

Pay Per Click (PPC) invented in the 90s used paid users to click on your URL and go view.

The problem is that once a user clicks on the webpage they don’t pay attention to the information written on it. In other words, the attention part is missing. The users are not really paying applications and a lot of them are what’s called dead traffic. With 47% of the Internet users using BlockAds the PPC model is slowly dying, but spending for ads is rising. This inspired the CrowdClick team to create a new model — Pay Per Attention (PPA). When the traffic comes to the website the users have to actually take actions — to be educated about what the project is doing as well answering questions or giving feedback.

In a way what they are doing is 2in1 solution taking the old PPC model and allowing crowd action features for collecting feedback and gaining quality traffic.

As a user, you are able to click, answer and earn crypto. How? It is very simple: you sign up, you add your public key or connect to a wallet and then you see the tasks feed where URL owners post requests and pay you to view their website. When you go to their website there is 30 seconds timer and when the time is up, you will have to answer some basic questions about the information on the website. When you answer you are paid in crypto.

Sweet, huh?

The 10 startups will follow 4 weeks of online mentoring at the end of which, will pitch again on Demo Day! This time the presentations will be streamed live globally and you are invited to watch them!