Dev Protocol receives 40M JPY from Monex Ventures and MIRAISE

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Dev Protocol — Accelerating Web3 with Clubs

4 min readJun 15, 2020

Quick Take

FRAME00 (Dev team) has raised 40 million JPY in a seed round from Monex Ventures and MIRAISE through equity funding. This is the second funding round they have raised, after last September.
Monex Ventures is a corporate venture capital of the Monex Group, the parent company of cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck.
MIRAISE made a follow-on investment after the pre-seed round.
Dev team is moving forward with the official release of Stakes.social and improving the experience. And they will plan for token distribution and do public sales in stages as appropriate.

the VCs in this round

About Monex Ventures Inc

Monex Ventures, Inc. is a fully owned subsidiary of Monex Group, Inc (“Monex”, TSE: 8698). Monex operates a global network of online brokerage businesses in Japan, US, Hong Kong and Australia. Furthermore, it provides crypto trading to its customers through its subsidiaries Coincheck and TradeStation Crypto Inc

We are very excited to be part of the DEV community. DEV’s goal of supporting innovators and creators through staking is a creative way to build a sustainable developer’s community. Its mission is synonymous to the Fund’s mission of supporting the start-up ecosystem.

About MIRAISE

MIRAISE is a seed VC focused on programmer entrepreneurs. It was founded in 2018 by Shinichi Iwata, former head of Skype Japan. He is uniquely positioned to support engineer-founders in Japan with his deep technical experience as a former developer as well as his operational experience as CEO of Skype Japan K.K. and as a Partner at Atomico for several years.

MIRAISE has invested in more than 20 startups founded by engineers in 18 months so far. At Atomico, Shin was in charge of SmartNews, Rovio, Gengo and Supercell and other portfolio for their investment and market expansion into Japan. Shin started his career as an engineer at Lotus and Microsoft. Later, Shin joined the establishment of Japanese tech startup Ariel Network (acquired by Works Applications), where, as a P2P (peer-to-peer) technology expert, he delivered numerous speeches & articles and published a book about P2P technology during the time. Shin received his Bachelor’s degree from the Keio University in physics. Kauffman Fellow since 2017, from Class 20.

The Dev Protocol started out with the founder’s strong task awareness : “ Valuable activities can’t be sustained if they aren’t paid fairly for.” Rather than how to use blockchain, the best solution to solve this challenge was blockchain and crypto. MIRAISE is actively investing in solutions that engineers can bring forth. Dev Protocol is currently gaining a huge support from all over the world for its strong mission and the meticulous protocol design to make it happen.
We are pleased to support FRAME00 in their quest to explore unexplored territory.

Dev Protocol achievements to date

Started an OSS-focused MVP in July 2018 and started monetizing OSS in February 2019. Adopted by Microsoft for Startups in November of the same year and went live on the mainnet in January 2020. We started Try Out for Staking in February of this year, and in June, we announced that Stakes.social Pre-release for developers soon attracted the attention of crypto investors around the world. It briefly skyrocketed to the world’s top 7 in trading volume on Uniswap. As of June 2, creators have earned over 60 million JPY in total rewards so far.

🥨 Stakes.social site
https://stakes.social

What problem does the Dev Protocol solve?

This is the first system where all activities of creators are monetized and supporting creators will become “asset management”. Unlike traditional donations and crowdfunding, it implements staking technology on the blockchain, so you can earn even more interest without losing your money when you support them. It enables the sustainability of both activities and support, where previously unvalued activities are also monetized and supporters earn interest for supporting someone else.

Upcoming events.

We are grateful to have successfully completed our fundraising in the face of the global impact of the COVID-19. FRAME00’s mission is “to create a society where all innovators are valued and continuously challenged”, and we have been trying to build an ecosystem of creators who are trying to create a better world. We will expand the DApp partners to enable various activities to be monetized, including efforts to overcome the COVID-19 disaster, and plan for token distribution and do public sales in stages as appropriate.