Investors looking for an entrance into the crypto space have many choices. And while many are called, few are chosen. Some are different and frankly, better.
Enter
Blockchain Foundry Inc. (
CSE.BCFN,
OTCMKTS: BLFDF,
Forum) – a company that develops and commercializes blockchain-based business solutions and provides consulting services to corporate clients seeking to incorporate blockchain technology into their businesses.
In this fascinating video Q&A, Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson caught up with company CEO, Dan Wasyluk, to get investors up-to-date on all things Blockchain Foundry.
(CLICK IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO)
SH: To start off with, Dan, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the history of the company?
DW: Yeah, so me personally, I'm really more of a technologist. I've always been someone who is really passionate about building things that people really need and that serve a purpose that a large audience can derive value from. So back in 2013, I essentially teamed up with a group of other technologists on some Bitcoin forums exploring this new technology called blockchain that Bitcoin, this digital sort of internet currency was all about and built on top of right. Back in 2013, we then use that time period to really explore what could be done with sort of blockchain technology. We had some cryptocurrency projects prior to Syscoin, the current sort of flagship protocol that we focus on today that we sort of got our feet wet with and then we realized the potential for value creation within blockchain technology.
So we developed an actual blockchain protocol called Syscoin, which initially was really focused more on ease of use for business players in the space like allowing business consumers to more readily access the value that blockchain brought to the table and as time has gone on and the space has evolved you know, Syscoin has really become more of a currency focused on high-speed transactions that are regulatory compliant while offering scale and speed that challenges other blockchains.
As we developed that protocol, we realized the potential for providing businesses with a service to realize the value within that protocol itself assisted by our expertise that we've built up over the years and that's really where in 2016, we founded Blockchain Foundry to help organizations not only realize the value that blockchain brings to the table in the context of the Syscoin protocol, but also helping them to realize the value that blockchain brings to the table in a really blockchain agnostic way.
Now we have experience with blockchains ranging from private permissioned blockchains like Hyperledger and Corda, all the way to kind of your more standard public permissionless blockchains, which are the Bitcoins, the Syscoins and the Ethereums of the world. Really Blockchain Foundry for past three years has been a consulting focused organization. As we have been trying to identify a good product market fit to focus a product initiative around and really this year with some of the funding that we'll speak about later, we've now become enabled to pursue those product initiatives and we've got three years of essentially market research to inform how to steer those product initiatives and so I really think we've got some exciting stuff coming this year.
SH: You just completed a significant $10 million dollar private raise. Can you expand on this for our investor audience?
DW: Yeah. So the private raise is really all about that product pivot, right? We had been doing very well in the consulting space. We've become profitable just off of our consulting business alone but consulting in the blockchain space is actually very challenging because of the many different use cases that blockchain can be applied to and the different blockchains that service those particular use cases and so scaling a consulting practice in the blockchain space is actually very challenging. So we'd always wanted to develop a product focus in the blockchain space but we knew that we really had to make sure that as we went down the road with a product focus that we would really have to have a lot of confidence in the product market fit because there are so many different opportunities in the blockchain space, figuring out which one to focus on and which one is going to have the highest potential value with the lowest opportunity cost is really what we've been trying to identify through our consulting practice.
We've identified several opportunities in that respect and the 10 million (dollars) that we raised in the private raise is actually being used to not only pivot to focusing on developing those products but also being used to continue scaling the consulting practice. I mean it is a challenging practice to scale but we have never had a failed project and all of our clients are very happy with the service we've provided such that we've actually had to turn away a few clients just because we only have so much bandwidth on the consulting side, but we have utilized some of that recent raise to build up our consulting practice further, so it can continue to scale while we in parallel begin developing products.
SH: You’ve recently announced that you’ve entered into a blockchain development agreement with Gifty. This may be news to many investors. Can you unpack the benefits of it?
DW: Yeah, so Gifty is an interesting platform because they are looking to make crypto more accessible for mainstream users which I think is a big enabler for this space as a whole and so what the client behind Gifty came to us with as a problem is they had a lot of friends and family that they wanted to introduce to crypto by gifting them a little bit of cryptocurrency. what they found was that that process was actually very complicated. So complicated that most of the folks that they provided cryptocurrency to as gifts never even accessed that cryptocurrency because of how steep the learning curve is to setting up a hardware wallet, transferring currency, all this stuff and so he came to us with a problem of “I want to make it dead simple to send cryptocurrency as gift and when I send that cryptocurrency as a gift, I want to be able to potentially myself make passive income on unclaimed gifts and also make it easier for those I am providing the gifts to, to access those same passive income opportunities through this platform.
So we're kind of combining those two ideas of making it really easy to gift crypto and access that gift of crypto but then also once you have that gift of crypto, immediately having a place that you can do something with it and doing something with it actually earns you more of it in for the person. On the other side of the person providing the gifts, if you're sending some crypto to your grandma and for some reason, she doesn't claim it for a few months, you still have the opportunity to leverage it in staking or DeFi or those types of different contexts while it's waiting to be claimed.
Right. So that's really kind of what Gifty is about and what we're exploring with them as to the specifics of sort of how users earn passive income on the platform and the different sort of DeFi integrations that we may bring into Gifty. Those are still sort of being figured out. The goal there is making it easy for users to gift and access the gifts of crypto and then immediately providing them a platform on which they can use those gifts of crypto.
SH: Recently, Blockchain Foundry partnered with REVXM Inc. to develop and launch white-labelled NFT products for sports and entertainment. Could you highlight what makes this news so significant?
DW: This one's really interesting because this is one of the first product initiatives that we've publicly disclosed. So with all of our product initiatives we have a strategy of sort of partnering with an expert in the space and then bringing our technological acumen to them and combining those two and the bringing a product to market with those two powers combined, so in the context of REVXM we bring technical expertise in the blockchain space application and platform development. REVXM has an existing sports and entertainment business. They also are very closely connected with major retailers and large concert venues and like music halls. So what we're working on with them is we're kind of taking on the technical side of that. They've got the connections in this space to sort of the customers in we're essentially building a kind of white label and NFT platform where be at a music festival or a specific sports personality or a retailer who has an existing internet presence. Any of those entities will be able to leverage non- fungible tokens, the context of their business and we're really focused more on non- fungible tokens that costs like $5 to $150.
The product that we're building with REVXM is really not focused on the like large one-off multimillion dollars sort of NFT sales. It's really focused more on the high volume, lower cost NFT sales and the NFTs that will be produced through that platform will have unique characteristics that can be leveraged with the various customers of that platform. So you might have as an example a music festival that decides to leverage the platform to offer NFTs to their attendees and then onsite at that music festival, those NFTs may be able to be leveraged for different sorts of perks or unique experiences. At the same time, we're working with other projects that allow for NFTs to be leveraged in the context of like augmented reality and virtual reality experiences. So what we're developing with REVXM is really focused more on how customers can leverage NFTs to provide their user base with not only a unique collectible but a unique collectible that also can get them access to special perks or special experiences, that kind of thing.
SH: Can you tell our audience a bit more about these white-labeled NFTs, what they are, and their unique features in the crypto and blockchain space?
DW: Yep. So NFTs stand for non-fungible tokens essentially, it's just a token that is unique to a specific piece of data, in most cases. There are also fractionalized non-fungible tokens where you take a unique item and you turn it into a bunch of smaller tokens that are all tied back to your fraction of that unique item but really what we're seeing more of right now is just the kind of standard one-off NFT where you're creating what I like equate to like digital collectibles and that's really all they are is that you create a piece of art that you want to provide to the market and you want people to be able to validate that you are the author of that art and there are only so many authenticated copies of that piece of art.
That's kind of the root value of NFTs. It is provenance and authentication and so there've been some challenges in the NFT space because there aren't very strong mechanisms today for a valid validating the authenticity of an NFT author. There have been issues in the NFT space where people have like impersonated Banksy and they're putting forward “Banksy NFTs” just to find out that it's just some guy in his basement, it's not really Banksy. So there are still those types of challenges to the NFT space where it's like how do you know that someone claiming on the internet that they are person XYZ, and they're offering these NFTs and person XYZ is a notable personality. How do you validate that? So I think that what we'll start to see over the course of the coming 8 to 12 months is systems that allow for easier validation of the fact that this NFT is from the real Banksy and the real Banksy on Ethereum is this address or this is a real NFT from Tom Brady and the Tom Brady NFT address on the Ethereum is this. There's the beginnings of that kind of ecosystem of sort of you know authenticated accounts on the blockchain sort of coming into being but there's nothing there's nothing really standardized in that space yet and so you have to do a little extra due diligence when you're buying an NFTs to make sure that you are buying what you think you are buying it over time and with platforms like the one that we are helping to develop a REVXM will help to eliminate some of that uncertainty and the sort of digital collectible.
SH: The Company looks set for strong growth in 2021. How are you placed to expand operations to meet this increased demand?
DW: We're actually really well positioned for our goals in 2021. We're currently working on at least three different products concurrently and we have a very full consulting pipeline, and we have like a very good sort of warm pipeline on the consulting side of additional clients on board if we were to need to bring them some new ones on as current ones roll off and we complete their projects. The growth that we're focused on is making sure that we are ramping up the team on the product side to be able to capitalize on the opportunities in the marketplace exists today because there is a limited window of opportunity on all of these things. So we're staffing up more on the product side to make sure that we're able to capitalize on those opportunities while at the same, changing the way that we service our consulting business to make it easier to bring on new clients and also spin down clients and take more of our internal staff and apply them to products.
So we've got a lot of BCF internal staff working on product. We started to ramp up the sort of contracting and augmentation staff that we're using to sort of help support the growth of our consulting practice and we're really trying to invest more in those products in the in-house knowledge related to those products so that as they get out into the world and they see traction in various markets, we're able to quickly add new features, address feedback that we're getting from the market and that kind of thing without there being long delays between updates to the price.
SH: How do you see your current valuation relative to other blockchain companies, per se?
DW: That's an interesting question because Blockchain Foundry is unique in that it is a blockchain company birthed out of a team of blockchain engineers that already had an operating blockchain protocol prior to becoming a blockchain company. So you'll find a lot of companies in the space that became blockchain companies after Bitcoin had one of its various sort of parabolic rises in value and then all of a sudden, they're a blockchain company that you know, come to them for business. We're different in that we've been in this space before Bitcoin was sort of the hot topic. We also are a blockchain development firm that has its own blockchain protocol. Syscoin has a blockchain protocol that's been in operation since 2014, never been hacked, never gone down and it actually today is the second most secure blockchain on the face of the planet.
Second only to Bitcoin by hash rate and you accomplish that by securing Syscoin blockchain with concepts called merged-mining which basically means that Bitcoin miners can recycle the energy that they use for Bitcoin mining and apply it to Syscoin and potentially earn Syscoin. Through that practice we've gained more than 18% of Bitcoin's global hash rate just by Bitcoin miners realizing that they can recycle some of their power and use that towards earning Syscoin and for the securing the Syscoin blockchain which has led to, if you go on to Coinwarz, which is like a website that provides a lot of objective and metrics around blockchains, you'll see that if you rank the blockchains by hash rate, which is how blockchains are secured, we'll see Syscoin is the second most secure blockchain on the planet.
So we're really excited about that and we have a lot of new innovations coming to Syscoin in this year that we're working on contributing to the protocol. One of those is what we call the network agnostic Ethereum virtual machine. It's actually an optimized version of Ethereum's smart contract engine that will allow users to move their Ethereum based contract tokens over to Syscoin and appreciate both costs and speed benefits that Syscoin has above Ethereum. Syscoin also has something that we see coming into the space is regulatory compliance and so our company is one that is very much in tune with the market when it comes to the fact that regulations and further compliance obligations are going to be coming to the cryptocurrency space. So rather than sort of being the I don't know, anarchist crypto punk sort of company, which some blockchain companies choose to be, we choose more to work with regulators and try to understand the challenges that they're facing and develop tooling and technology that allows them to overcome those challenges while still allowing the benefits and the values of public permissionless blockchains to shine.
We think that there is a reasonable balance between regulatory compliance and public permissionless blockchains, such that you can have both and you don't have to choose to be public permission-less and non-compliant or private permissioned, and compliant. We think that we've a good balance of the two and that's part of what we're actually focusing on with our product strategy this year and we look to share more about that with the market. As we get closer to some material news.
SH: And finally, Dan, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked please feel free to elaborate.
DW: I think that the only thing I'd like to add is that a few weeks ago we published a roadmap for Blockchain Foundry over the coming months. That's still holds very true. I think that with some of the feedback we've been getting around other products that we've been testing in the market, that we will be able to share some information around how the BCF wallet will focus on a regulatory compliance focus and how other products that we're developing will integrate with that while at the same time being able to serve use cases for things like the CollectDeFi JV(Joint Venture) that we've entered into with REVXM and allowing users to not only create NFTs directly from the BCFN wallet, but also purchase and hold NFTs that are that are resourced from platforms like CollectDeFi that various artists and sports and entertainment personalities are utilizing to provide their user base with collectibles.
For regular updates, visit
blockchainfoundry.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.