BlockRocket — 2019
A year in review
BlockRocket is proud to say it has survived the crypto-winter and we have grown in terms of clients, staff, revenue and more importantly knowledge in 2019. Blockchain is anti-fragile and we are happy to report that we are helping teams build production-ready solutions for real usage today. Below are some of our highlights for 2019 and teasers at what’s to come in 2020!
KnownOrigin: A Digital Art Marketplace
Our first dApp ❤️ — 18 months old and going from strength to strength.
Last year saw lots of growth and new features ranging from self service portals, full rebrands and many incremental improvements to all aspects of the marketplace. It’s now easier than ever to buy tokenised digital art.
KnownOrigin is now at the forefront of the #cryptoart movement and is pushing the boundaries of what tokenisation of art means and validating why it’s such a practical and viable application of blockchain technologies. With over 7000 artworks sold, over 2000 limited edition artworks from 180+ artists — more than $60k in primary sales generated!
2020 is set to be a bountiful year for non-fungible token of all shapes and sizes, we plan on continuing to be at the forefront of these technologies for both our own products and the clients we work with.
More information on KnownOrigin can be found here.
BrewDog
We want blockchain to be used to solve problems in larger enterprises so we have enjoyed the challenge of helping BrewDog, a huge global brewery, to use decentralised technology.
Innovation is at the heart of BrewDog and they understand how new technology can bring instant benefit internally and to their customer base.
Blockrocket are a real delight to work with. They have a unique mix of creativity, intellect and deep technical experience which helps bring everything they work on to life with quick delivery and constant reflection — Martin Dempster
We have be working closely to build out a scalable modern cloud based solution which incorporates some pretty exciting elements of blockchain technologies. This year is set to be an exciting year for BrewDog as these solutions mature and are used by their engaged customer base.
Read more in our short case study.
CryptoKaiju: Trackable Physical Toys
What a year for CryptoKaiju. Including a CryptoKitties collaboration and an exclusive Sacramento Kings NBA toy, not to mention, a sold out spooky release. There are now over 650 physical toys tracked on the blockchain in all 4 corners of the world!
We believe supply chains with trackable physical goods are going to be huge in the upcoming years and we love proving out this concept with toys shipped globally.
CUDO
Tokenisation is one of the most powerful tools in blockchain’s arsenal. Cudo are building a new token economy to power their distributed computing marketplace platform.
We are helping this ambitious team with consultancy and engineering skills in all aspects of the new token economy they are forging, we bring to the party deep knowledge of smart contract design as well as invaluable insights into how to build decentralised retail focused decentralised applications.
It’s been a pleasure to work with BlockRocket who are not only great blockchain developers but also meet their deadlines and fit our team very well. BlockRocket have helped us design and build software needed to support our computing platform. We look forward to working with them more in 2020! — Luke Gniwecki
Further details can be found in the following case study.
The DAOsaka Experiment
Decentralised finance aka #DeFi was huge in 2019 — So we decided to test a theory with the blockchain’s most respected collective: MetaCartel 🌶
Is it possible for a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) to create value from art-based tokens are return a profit to the share-holders?
TL;DR: It worked. We sold out and returned a small profit for all…
#cryptoart backers pledged into the DAO to create art for DevCon V in Osaka. DAI (a USD stable coin) was used to raise funds to commission 8 artworks from leading digital artists. We sold the art as non-fungible tokens and was able to pump the revenue back into the on-chain governance structure for a small profit. Result.
BlockRocket and MetaCartel made an awesome team together. They were great communicators and were with us the whole way. A solid team to back you up — Peter ‘pet3rpan’
Moloch v2
We love DAOs. Decentralised autonomous organisations are powerful vehicle for on-chain governance and are yet to really be explored in their full potential in our minds.
The original Moloch DAO (👹 Moloch) quickly became infamous for its simplicity and allowing projects to clone and set up their own managed funds with a familiar workflow.
We were delighted to win the contract to help deliver the unit testing and refactoring efforts for Moloch v2 (and help get the codebase over the line ready for audit) and we are excited to see the new improved DAOs come to life in 2020.
BlockCities.co
Blockcities, who we provide engineering support for plus the initial build for the project, went from strength to strength in 2019 with new buildings, a city building game, innovative campaigns and collaborations with MarbleCards and FOAM. Over 2000+ buildings are currently in existence — architect a building today! https://blockcities.co
BlockCities wouldn’t be here without BlockRocket. Before users could build any buildings, I came to BlockRocket to help me build the first BlockCities building generator. With their help, we launched the Mystery Machine, building profiles, limited edition collections, and all the groundwork needed 🙌🏽 — Preston Attebery
NiftyFootball Game
We built a football trading card collectable game with legendary Manchester designer Stanley Chow 😛 — over 2500 cards have been sold and traded to date. Each card is unique with individual traits and attributes baked into the blockchain token and they can be used to build and trade teams.
This was an amazing experience in general and we were able to use our knowledge of building NFTs and architecting a full end to end production platform with public APIs and blockchain event handling. Full stack blockchain.
More about this use-case can be found here.
TwistedSister.io
Through our existing work on KnownOrigin.io we got invited to help an art collective in Basel with an interesting crypto-art project that creates 21 tokens to represent an evolving 3D model via daily auctions. As part of the solution we baked in secondary payments direct into the smart contracts to solve that age-old problem in art on how artists get remunerated after their work is initially sold!
It was a great pleasure to be working with BlockRocket. Alert, enthusiastic and reliable team with profound technical competence to both satisfy the specific needs of the artists and to push the envelope of the emerging NFT space. — Armin Blasbichler
We travelled to a workshop in Basel and delivered the engineering sidein order to bring their project to life.
TokenLandia
TokenLandia approached us and have been one of the most forward thinking and adventurous enterprises we have been working with in 2019.
They, like ourselves, are strong believers in public traceability, non-fungible tokens and how leveraging a public ledger can be a massive value add to many products in existence today.
We have been consulting on new ideas and building solutions for them. 2020 will see the fruition of their first solution and we cannot wait to see it live. Watch this space as token landia are set to make waves in the physically backed NFT space.
“Without Blockrocket our TokenLandia.com development cycle would be well behind where it is today. The NFT landscape is rapidly evolving and these guys have a firm grasp on these developments. Here at TokenLandia.com we look forward to working together going forward.”
David J. Hart, CEO TokenLandia.com
All Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain
After attending and participating in several APPG evidence meetings with a shared goal at governmental level to advance blockchain technology adoption we got an invite to Summer Reception by the chair of group Damien Moore MP.
We will be continuing our involvement going forward helping steer how blockchain and cryptocurrencies can be applied at a national and governmental level. #helpboris
Alice
Alice Wallet is a ground breaking and revolutionary new take on what a mobile first crypto wallet should look and feel like.
We have been helping Alice work though some of the growing pains which come with a larger complex codebase. Additionally, we have been consulting on how to leverage some of the cloud native tooling which we know well such as Google’s Firebase and it’s associated messaging stack.
Alice provides a seamless mobile SDK to allow DApp developers to build native mobile experiences for their customers without having to worry about wallet management or platform specific coding thanks to its React Native implementation. Exciting times are ahead for Alice.
Blockchain Manchester Community Group
It all started with this blockchain community. This year we had meet-ups about scaling blockchains, stable coins, lightning payments, and the new kid on the blockchain: Libra. The Blockchain Manchester group now has over 725 people — the North West is #decentralised.
We have more stellar speakers lined up for 2020. Make sure you come along for talks, chat, beer and pizza!
Sign up here 👉https://www.meetup.com/BlockchainManchesterMeetup/
Artists Ahead
The music royalties system is broken. Artists Ahead is aiming to address this balance and provide provable copyright, quicker renumeration and true transparency for Artists.
We have been helping with consultancy and a proof-of-concept using layer 2 solutions such as POA Network / xDAI to show that high volume transactions at low costs are achievable on the blockchain.
BlockRocket are very knowledgeable in the space and we found them very easy to work from day one — Charlotte Wigham
Rendar
This blockchain marketplace is a new way to collect urban art. As well as customer facing store for smart contract backed art purchasing and display we built a full back-office interface to allow administrators to tokenise art and manage the lifecycle of editions.
Rendar’s first collection from My Dogs Sighs sold out and this year they are releasing new collections with new street artists. Watch this space!
BlockRocket are knowledgeable and very professional, In a nutshell, a pleasure to work with — Mark Date
Panvala
We applied to a couple of grant schemes in 2019 and we are happy to report Panvala backed our compound interest fair-usage gas station relay research 🙌
Trickle Down
This ground breaking experiment of a tokenised, four-screen video installation and soundscape attached to the blockchain goes live at Arebyte Gallery, London from 24 January — 26 February, 2020.
Reflecting on wealth disparities across very different communities, Trickle Down is aiming to take advantage of a powerful blockchain feature: rapid renumeration. With the drop of a fiat coin into a custom built machine, videos documenting this disparity are played.
BlockRocket have assisted with consultancy and building the smart contracts and associated API required for the renumeration to work in realtime as part of the art installation.
Berlin Blockchain Week 2019
In Berlin we finally got to meet “in real life” many of the decentralised teams and projects we have been working with, projects we have contributed on, and the talented people who make the tools that are pushing blockchain into the mainstream.
Some of the talks and workshops really kickstarted new ideas and opinions on diverse topics ranging from “privacy” to “how will blockchain scale” and “building web3 products for the masses”. We will definitely be attending this again in the coming year as it was an amazing experience plus Burgermeister stays open till 3am and does world-class cheeseburgers 🍔
BlockRocket in 2020
We are more bullish on blockchain now than ever before and we see 2020 and the coming decade of being the period where decentralised technology becomes part of everyday life (whether you realise it or not).
In 2019 we have helped tens of companies around the world go from ideation to implementation, consulting on how to leverage decentralised technologies writing many thousands of lines of code from smart contracts, to APIs and frontend interfaces in the process. We love building in this space and are constantly blown away by the innovation in this sector. Blockchain is maturing and it will certainly be an interesting ride along the way.
Our own internal products have been a playground for experimentation and we are committed to growing the various dApps & tools we have built. We are excited to see how these blockchain platforms evolve with the industry in the upcoming years.
If you have ambitions of using this game-changing technology then reach out as we may be able to help.
Happy New Year!
Follow our tweets at @blockrockettech
BlockRocket are based in Manchester and we help companies with blockchain and decentralised technology.
