Founder Story: Benny — Tap Protocol

Published in

morningstar-ventures

5 min readJun 10, 2024

Hello Community,

We’ve got some brilliant projects in our portfolio and want to tell you more about the founders and teams behind them. You will have the opportunity to learn more about specific projects through our interviews on a regular basis. Feel free to post any questions you may have further down in the comments section.

In today’s interview, we have Benny — Founder of TAP Protocol. Let’s go!

Hi Benny, we’re excited to have you here. Before we dive into the questions, could you share a bit about yourself and your journey into the crypto world?

Before I got into Ordinals back in February 2023, I was a Software Engineer and Solidity developer. Mainly trying to bring in new ideas into the NFT space. While it was fun, it pretty quickly turned out that the NFT space back then was pretty much streamlined and beyond PFP drops, there wasn’t much interest in innovation. The bear market didn’t help on that either.
However, when I stumbled upon Ordinals, it was quickly clear to me that storing data on chain (inscriptions) in an affordable way was a no-brainer. Since then I am developing alongside Ordinals but also general developments around Bitcoin being used as a platform.

What unique problem in the Bitcoin ecosystem did you identify that led to the development of Tap Protocol? How does your project stand out?

Not so much about Bitcoin itself but rather Meta Protocols within Bitcoin Ordinals (which TAP Protocol is). I realized that a lot more had to be explored in their utilization, enabling functionality and new asset-classes that were nowhere to be seen. One expression of that is Digital Matter Theory which is implemented by the TAP Protocol. It represents a non-arbitrary way of creating assets, based on historical Bitcoin data (fungible and non-fungible).
Aside from that, I always wanted to stay as close as possible to Bitcoin L1, making it more efficient to distribute and transfer assets. Another expression of that are authorities within the protocol that allow for efficient functionality on L1.

You recently announced the public sale of your token, $TAP, on Coinlist. This will be the first Ordinals project on this exchange. Could you explain what this milestone means for the Tap Protocol team?

The launch with Coinlist will help the TAP Protocol, and the Bitcoin space as a whole, to be recognized as a serious platform to build on and for. In the past, new project launches were dominated by EVM-based projects and we contribute to changing this, offering an alternative directly on the original crypto platform that spawned all this.

Your project has already garnered a significant user base of over 70K, with 50+ projects built on top of your protocol. Could you elaborate on your strategies to enhance your visibility within the crypto community?

Our strategy consists of a health mix between marketing, education and making it attractive for developers to actually build on the TAP Protocol. Since the protocol solves a lot of problems — and we are going to solve many more moving forward — it is a natural choice for developers to create their projects. This may start with cost efficient airdrops and may end with smart contract-like features that enable DeFi on L1.

Could you please explain the relationship between Tap Protocol, Trac Core, and the PIPE project? How do they work together under the umbrella of the Trac System?

Protocols generally need a way to verify activity. This activity is being recorded and distributed in a decentralized way. Both are handled by Trac Core, which represents our decentralized indexing solution. TAP Protocol represents the reference use-case for Trac Core and the PIPE Protocol will follow suit moving forward.
PIPE is an Ordinal-independent UTXO-protocol, while TAP Protocol is an account based one. Each protocol has its own audience, use-case, and technical capabilities. When it comes to utility, we are about to utilize PIPE as an AI platform for Bitcoin.

In December 2023, you secured a $4.2M Seed Round led by Sora Ventures. How did you use the raised funds? Are you planning other investment rounds in the future?

We are using the raised funds for developing applications to support the ecosystem that we are building. Of course, some of that capital is further being used for marketing as well as ecosystem growth.

Is there anything you would like to share about Tap Protocol?

At the heart of TAP’s highly advanced functionality lies the concept of ‘authorities.’ Essentially, a plugin system that allows builders to ‘TAP’ into the protocol and extend its capabilities with limitless potential, and also customizable decentralization to suit their goals. This allows TAP to solve some of the fundamental problems experienced by the Ordinals ecosystem during the past 18 months.
There are 3 core authorities for builders to take advantage of when building on TAP:
‘Token Authorities’ — These allow for the creation and management of a token supply with predetermined rules on how they can be used or behave within your ecosystem. This includes use cases such as governance rights, rewards, and compliance measures.
‘Privilege Authorities’ — These enable on-chain whitelisting and also prevent frontrunning during mint events. This is significant, as privileges make it cryptographically impossible for participants to be sniped in the mempool, and so it offers communities much greater peace of mind when deciding whether to mint or not, and also saves them money as they do not need to raise their fees when transacting.
This is great news for launchpads, projects, or any deployers, as with TAP, they are now able to FULLY control where their assets are issued to.
Additionally, with our ‘multi-send’ feature they can distribute in batches, which provides huge savings compared to the other token standards on Bitcoin (BRC-20 & Runes) that demand single transaction distribution, which is highly cost prohibitive for most people/projects.
Finally, ‘Promises’ allow TAP to facilitate smart-contract-like execution on L1 Bitcoin, but in a revolutionary way, and with an entirely different type of computation. We’ll soon be announcing more details on how this is achieved.

—

Thanks a lot for your time Benny. Good luck with your projects!

You can check the social media profiles of the project: Website | Twitter | Discord

The Morningstar Ventures Team

About Morningstar Ventures

Morningstar Ventures is an investment firm backing ambitious ideas by early-stage founders. Based in Dubai, Morningstar Ventures focuses primarily on the blockchain and digital assets space and is led by CEO Danilo S. Carlucci. The firm is active in token and equity investments and has a particularly strong focus on the MultiversX ecosystem.