Founders Letter — Inside Bolt’s 2023 Growth Story

Chronicling a groundbreaking year for the most innovative live streaming ecosystem, and how we will be forging ahead in 2024.

To our community members,

As we reflect on the past year at Bolt, we are filled with a sense of optimism and determination. Despite the challenging macroeconomic environment in 2023, our growth and development have been steadfast. We made important adjustments in the way in which we will organise our products and overall business moving forward, while still preserving the long-term investments that we believe can change the future of Bolt for customers, shareholders, and team members.

This update is to share with you some of the exciting strides we have made.

Progress and Innovation at Bolt

Our focus has been on enhancing our offerings and expanding our reach. We have added a thousand new features to our products this year, which averages about three new features each day. These advancements are geared towards improving the Bolt experience for everyone involved, both in the short and long term.

We’ve also forged significant partnerships with industry giants such as Bloomberg, TV5 Monde, France24, FACHAuto (Porsche Carrera Cup), and continued to strengthen our ties with existing partners like Euronews, OneFootball, Hisense Group, and VIDAA. Such collaborations and our ongoing adjustments in product management underscore our commitment to Bolt’s long-term vision, benefiting our community and partners.

Over the past six years, Bolt has seen remarkable growth. Our product range has vastly expanded, and our reach has extended globally.

• When we started Bolt’s first financial year in 2019, we only had a mobile app, did not have any live streaming capability, and had just recorded our first 100,000 quarterly active users.
• Today, Bolt+ streams a plethora of live entertainment, news, and sports content, with a vibrant content creator ecosystem that accounts for 60 million seconds of live engagements per month. Our creators are now creating 5,000 hours of live streams monthly, and Bolt+ has communities in multiple languages all around the world.
• The Bolt+ platform is now on 10 million Hisense and VIDAA-powered TVs globally (over 180 brands), with new markets and TV brands being added consistently. This is up from 4 million TVs in 2022, and 2 million TVs in 2021. This explosive growth is testament to our approach on efficient budget management, strong co-marketing with our partners, and investing in features to strengthen the vibrancy and feature-rich experience of our platform.

Delivering on our strong spirit of Innovation

Innovation has been a key driver for us. We will continue to grow and nurture this spirit of innovation at Bolt, and distinguish ourselves as not just the fastest growing live streaming ecosystem, but also the most innovative one. A platform that offers a valuable, and highly enticing alternative to the likes of YouTube and Twitch, that gives disenchanted content creators a sustainable way to earn a living from their work, and keeps them in full control. This sector of the entertainment economy is crying out for just this kind of innovation and creator-focused alternative.

As a creator, being able to live stream immediately from your phone or computer into millions of smart TVs globally was not “a thing” when we launched our first smart TV app in 2020, nor was a chat room or payment overlay on live streams when we launched that in 2023.

As a business, building a live streaming ecosystem around a set of blockchain infrastructure was not obvious in 2021 when we started pursuing deeper blockchain integrations within the Bolt+ ecosystem. It still wasn’t when we launched our first payment gateways on Bolt+ (powered by Binance Pay, the Blockchain and credit card gateways) in 2022.

Our focus on blockchain culminated in the creation of our own BoltChain, set to be fully operational in Q1 2024.

• BoltChain is fully compatible with Ethereum based smart contracts, and is an important step in providing enhanced security and value to our community, brands, and creators.
• We are pleased to share that BoltChain is already live and on beta (Testnet), and is accessible publicly through the BoltChain Explorer, Store, and Staking experiences.
• Our entire community of Bolt Token users have traded close to $100M in engagement rewards in 2023, which is a significant increase from just $70M the year before.
• Over the course of 2024, we will start integrating BoltChain features directly into Bolt+, which will form the bedrock of utility that will span BoltChain and Bolt Token ecosystem. This will include smart contract deployments, new creator token issuances, as well as digital merchandise mints directly on BoltChain. All these new features will roll out in 2024 across our user and creator communities, and we’re excited about the innovation and revenue potential of this opportunity.

Our vision extends beyond just technological advancements. We’re reimagining the live streaming landscape by offering free, ad-supported TV channels (FAST) on Bolt+. The most prolific inclusion into our ad-support live streaming line up has been Bloomberg TV+ and Bloomberg Originals, which was launched officially on Bolt+ in December 2023.

We are also including support for our community of content creators to create their own FAST live channels as a remix of their previous live streams, which we believe is not just a world first, but a game changer for our creators to maximise their earning potential from every piece of content they create on the Bolt+ platform. After all, why just be a social media star when you can be a TV star? With our independent creators now creating more than 5,000 hours of live streams per month (a dramatic increase from less than 100 hours in 2022), we believe that this will create even more advertising inventory on the platform, and unlock more exciting advertising opportunities with our partner network of brand advertisers. As we continue to build out our additional native advertising capabilities in 2024, we look forward to collaborating with more advertisers to create innovative, performance driven advertising solutions on the Bolt+ platform.

2024: A live streaming ecosystem with AI and digital asset support

As part of our commitment to staying at the forefront of technology, we’re also diving into the realms of Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI. The realm of machine learning, ripe with potential for decades, has only recently become a mainstay in the business sector over the last five to ten years, thanks to the surge in affordable, high-capacity computing. For nearly half a decade, since our product stack’s inception, Bolt+ has deeply woven machine learning into various aspects, significantly enhancing live streaming efficiency, content personalisation, security measures, and language services for our creators and their audiences.

Although the subject of LLMs and generative AI is broad and potentially revolutionary enough to warrant its own detailed letter, we will reserve a deeper dive for a subsequent message. For the moment, it’s important to acknowledge that LLMs and generative AI are poised to significantly influence our customers and the entire BoltOS ecosystem.

Looking Ahead

We’ve certainly come a long way from our first founders letter in 2018, and made great strides in the progress of our ecosystem since our last founders letter in 2022.

2023 has been a transformative year for the business.

• Our very own blockchain infrastructure, BoltChain, is now on Testnet, and ready to be rolled out in 2024.
• We have shipped more than a thousand new features in 2023 on Bolt+ alone, transforming it into a viable and robust live-streaming ecosystem for creators globally.
• Our creator community now produces 5,000 hours of live streams each month, marking a significant rise from the total of 100 hours of live streams generated throughout the entire year of 2022.
• We have forged new strategic partnerships with the biggest companies in the world, such as Bloomberg, TV5 Monde, and FACHAuto (Porsche Carrera Cup)
• Our Bolt+ installation footprint now extends to 10 million TVs worldwide, encompassing VIDAA, Hisense TV, and over 180 other TV brands. Additionally, we have made our initial entry into the US TV market in the fourth quarter of 2023.

In 2024, we are focusing our attention towards

• growing our share of the global live streaming market,
• increasing volume and traction for our blockchain ecosystem within the digital asset market,
• upgrading our product ecosystem to incorporate generative AI and machine learning at its core.

The vast majority of the total market segment share in global live streaming still resides in YouTube and Twitch, and that is the market share (more than $100 billion in 2024) that we are addressing.

It is a similar story for blockchain-related growth, where we have $100M in Bolt Token engagement rewards being traded in 2023. That only represents about 0.001% of the $75T in digital assets being traded globally.

As these equations steadily flip — as we’re already seeing happen — we believe our leading user and creator experiences, relentless invention, customer focus, and hard work will result in significant growth in the coming years. Of course, this does not include the other businesses and experiences we are pursuing at Bolt, all of which are still in their early days.

The rise of generative AI marks an exciting evolution in machine learning. Operating on expansive language models, some trained with hundreds of billions of parameters and massive datasets, generative AI offers unparalleled breadth in learning and recall capabilities. At Bolt+, we’re forging our specialised Bolt+ LLM, with BoltGPT already in the works, and we remain committed to investing heavily in these models. The development of the Bolt+ LLM and BoltGPT is set to be instrumental across our entire ecosystem, and enhance the experiences of our community, brands, and creators.

We strongly believe that our best days are in front of us, and we look forward to working with our teammates at Bolt to make it so. Our dedication to innovation, community engagement, and technological advancement continues to drive us forward. We’re excited for what lies ahead and we can’t express how grateful we are to have you all on this journey with us.

Warm regards,

Jamal Hassim (CEO) and Christel Quek (CTO)
Co-Founders
Bolt