Wrapping up the First ConsenSys Tachyon Accelerator
On Friday, Nov. 16, ConsenSys Ventures held its first demo day for the Tachyon Accelerator in San Francisco. The day consisted of pitches from all sixteen projects in front of investors from the tech realm. Also, announcing Tachyon 2019! Apply here.
A tachyon is a theoretical particle that can never be at rest. It travels faster than light, and can hit you in the face before light reaches the surface. An interesting metaphor as we live our lives in exponential times.
— Joe Lubin, Tachyon Demo Day 2018, San Francisco
For the last ten weeks, small teams from across the world have been working with ConsenSys Ventures to take their projects from idea to MVP. With support, advice, and guidance from experts across ConsenSys, these teams embarked on an intensive journey to accelerate their blockchain platforms. The ten week program culminated on Friday as the the teams returned to San Francisco along with venture capitals, angel investors, and strategic advisors from Silicon Valley and beyond. The goal? Gain attention, investment, and take the project beyond MVP.
Kavita Gupta, head of ConsenSys Ventures, addressed the audience to start the day. She noted that her experience at ConsenSys has demonstrated just how global the blockchain ecosystem is. Investments come from all over the world, but so much experience and success in tech companies still rests in the Web2 companies of Silicon Valley. The challenge, therefore, has been to bridge the gap — both physical and ideological — between Silicon Valley and new global investment patterns and between Web2’s history of success and Web3’s potential for success. Tachyon is the first step in this mission; connecting projects from around the world to the venture capital power of San Francisco to jumpstart our global transition from Web2 to Web3.
Tachyon focused on three tracks: Ethereum-based projects, open-source initiatives, and social impact initiatives. Together, these categories reflect the broader commitment of the ConsenSys Mesh: to forward the progress of open-source projects that serve a more equitable future — which we believe can be most appropriately built off Ethereum.
More than ten countries were represented in the first Tachyon Accelerator. Thoughts from some of the program participants below [learn about all 16 projects here]:
Netherstorm: Berlin, Germany
Project: Netherstorm is building a platform to distribute games and digital goods by connecting them to blockchain and providing both players and developers new incentives and opportunities to interact with each other.
What did you seek from Tachyon: We needed to establish a team in order to build this platform and Tachyon enabled us to come together, gather our expertise from our diverse backgrounds and develop our platform from concept to MVP throughout the program and beyond.
How did Tachyon help you: We were connected to great advisors from the gaming industry that helped us shape our vision. Also having access to the whole ConsenSys Mesh and their expertise was a big plus as well. The ventures team encouraged us to stay on track with our schedule and to nail down our pitch.
What did you succeed during Tachyon: We developed our vision from concept to fully functional MVP on testnet in under 8 weeks and increased our network of partners from the gaming industry.
Learn More: Website, Medium, Twitter, Facebook
Fission: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Project: FISSION is the foundation for bringing interoperability and re-use to the entire Web3 Stack. With FISSION, individual smart contracts can be reviewed, verified, and hardened — and have their interactions defined as messages. Just as HTTP Status Codes made the web programmable, FISSION Codes are powering microservices for Web3.
What did you seek from Tachyon: We were happy to see that Tachyon was supporting an open source track for projects like ours. Combining the pressure and drive of being in a commercial startup focused accelerator program with building low-level infrastructure for the entire $20B Ethereum ecosystem was something we wanted to explore.
How did Tachyon help you: The Tachyon team connected us to a huge range of people within the Consensys “spoke” ecosystem, many of them working on the projects that we are planning to integrate with.
What are next steps for your project: Tachyon pushed us to focus on telling our story and big vision. We’ve now applied for over $750K of grants and we’re exploring further ways to get our foundation to sustainability.
Groundhog: Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada
Project:Groundhog is a suite of tools to power the crypto subscription economy. Groundhog consists of both a mobile wallet, and a payment gateway, Groundhog Pay, that can be installed on any web site via API or plugin. Customer and merchant funds are stored in state-of-the-art, non-custodial, multisignature smart wallets on Ethereum. Pre-authorized, recurring payments aren’t possible with today’s crypto wallets and payment gateways — Groundhog is building the technology to enable this huge category of payments for the new world of decentralized finance.
What did you seek from Tachyon: We first came across Tachyon while we were talking to ConsenSys Ventures about our pre-seed round earlier this year. After learning more about the program and opportunities the accelerator could provide for mentorship, network, and capital, it quickly became clear that there was a huge amount of value for us to participate. The ConsenSys Mesh includes so many projects and products that we use, work with and admire. The opportunity to build relationships with some of our most brilliant contemporaries in the space and to have our product and technology critiqued by them in an intimate and supportive way has dramatically increased time to technical completeness.
What did you succeed during Tachyon: During Tachyon, we built the entire alpha version of Groundhog, on-boarded three new hires, and greatly expanded our network in the Ethereum ecosystem, both inside and outside of the ConsenSys mesh.
Learn More: Website, Twitter, Facebook, Medium
GlobalXplorerº Antiquities Registry: Birmingham, Alabama
Project: The GlobalXplorerº Antiquities Registry is built upon the Ethereum Blockchain and utilizes crypto-economics to let any archaeologist or museum bring their excavations onto the blockchain, and then instantaneously register the provenance of every antiquity they find right at the moment of discovery. Anyone with an internet connection can monitor the whereabouts of the world’s antiquities, dispute their ownership, and track the journeys of these precious assets over time. Bringing blockchain technology to our existing world-class satellite-mapping platform we built with the 2016 TED Prize will allow our 80,000 registered users to participate in on-chain collaborations with archaeologists, access token-based education for citizen archaeology, and directly fund archaeological expeditions around the world.
What did you seek from Tachyon: We are archaeologists, designers and data scientists who believe passionately that archaeology needs to modernize in order to survive. There is there is no single digital archive that makes for a complete record of humans on earth. Think about that. In a world where climate change threatens this planet’s very existence, we urgently need to implement an immutable record of humanity. Meanwhile, looting is out of control and it’s believed well over half of the antiquities sold today have reached the markets via illegal trafficking. While we were confident blockchain could be a game changer in addressing these systemic issues, we were less certain about how to develop a blockchain product. We actually started work on this project back in 2016, and had a draft presentation and the beginnings of a white paper, but we knew we’d need development guidance. We were aware of ConsenSys and since we ourselves like to build things that change how people interact with the world, we were instantly drawn to them. Then we met Kavita Gupta at TED and she sort of held up this mirror on our project and we realized we really didn’t have the right business model or the understanding of blockchain we thought we had. I think it was then we realized that we seriously needed a blockchain bootcamp. So, when Tachyon was announced, we knew we wanted to be a part of it. And we feel incredibly fortunate to have been part of it. I would encourage every non-profit out there to seek out an opportunity to engage with VC’s and especially the ConsenSys Ventures team. And I hope Tachyon will expand its non-profit support–I’d love to see more non-profits brought into the innovation circle out here in SF.
How did Tachyon help you: Making our project mission understandable for people who are not archaeologists. Tachyon helped me to see our project through a tech-developer lens and that has been a great, great skill to learn… though honestly, NOT EASY. I think this was unusual, too, because usually a cohort is filled with developers who need to step out of their technical mindset and think about their use case. But for GXº, we were coming at it from the opposite point of view.
I think the biggest revelation we’ve had is that we never could have launched this project without the support of VC’s. This is a really uncommon path for a non-profit, to be in a VC accelerator program. But we found that applying a venture model to our project allowed us to think far more innovatively and completely reimagine how we could become more sustainable
Learn More: Website, Twitter, Medium
Quidli: Paris, France
Project: Quidli makes employee equity distribution simple and flexible. Our platform is designed for founders and CEOs to customize employee equity based on the performance metrics that matter to them. Setting employee equity plans is complicated, and founders and CEOs waste a lot of time, money and effort to figure this process out instead of focusing on their businesses. Built on Ethereum, Quidli simplifies this process by allowing users to program equity via our templates to ensure compliance and our smart contracts to enforce distribution and transfers rules.
What did you seek from Tachyon: We conceived of Quidli as a project to be built on blockchain at the peak of the ICO craze in the beginning of 2018. Our intention was to build an equity transfer protocol on top of Ethereum in order to power work for equity applications and to then raise funds via ICO. However, ICO and crypto conditions rapidly deteriorated before we kicked off our campaign and it was clear we’d have seek funding the “traditional” way if we wanted to continue the project. Accordingly, our stars were aligned and we learned about Tachyon from another innovation initiative run by MIT — we saw it as a great opportunity to work with an accelerator/investor who knows the bigger vision of the blockchain/crypto space and who understands that there will be growing pains in this space for the near future; but knows the immense potential for upside as the barriers to entry increasingly come down. And aside from it being a chance to learn and work from the center of the Ethereum enterprise world, being a part of Tachyon is a great startup experience in of itself — being part of the first cohort in one of the first major blockchain accelerators is exciting and it’s really inspired us to fully embrace a web 3.0 vision.
How did Tachyon help you: In our first one-to-one meeting with the ConsenSys Ventures team, we were immediately challenged to review our own product as it had been built at that stage and to frankly evaluate whether we were really leveraging blockchain in an effective way — in other words, they were asking us whether we wanted to build a serious technology product or if we just wanted to use an innovation buzzword to look fancy. Needless to say, it was a hard pill to swallow, but we went right back to the drawing board and really tightened up our architecture and rebuilt our MVP to adapt to the newer developments in blockchain/crypto and to lay the foundation to ultimately provide greater value to users of the Quidli platform.
Overall, Kavita and the ventures team have created a fantastically supportive environment for us to connect with and learn from some of the top minds and operators in the Ethereum and greater crypto ecosystems. The scene is still tight-knit and community-oriented enough where we can ask for introductions and actually get them. This has been a significant driver to accelerating development at Quidli.
Learn More: Website, Twitter, Medium
Looking Ahead
What’s next for Tachyon? Before the day ended, the team took the opportunity to announce the next Tachyon accelerator. The next accelerator will kick off in Berlin on April 1, 2019 and demo day will be on May 23 in San Francisco. Applications are open now at https://tachyoncv.vc/.
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
