Over the last six years, blockchain companies around the world have raised more than US$20Bn. Thanks to these large capital inflows into the sector, thousands of projects are now hiring talent and building new solutions and protocols. In just a few years, blockchain has gone from an unknown concept to one of the most competitive global technology sectors, and a pillar of the Fourth Industrial Revolution along with AI and IOT. Although this is extremely exciting, it can also be overwhelming for the uninitiated and especially so for investors.

Since Coinsilium's inception we have chosen a specific investment focus and a very distinctive proposition. In 2013, at a time when the word 'blockchain' was still largely unknown, we decided to focus on financing early-stage companies building blockchain technology tools and applications. Before co-founding Coinsilium I was managing venture capital and private equity funds and in 2014, in the nascent blockchain ecosystem, most investment opportunities naturally lay at the seed stages. This is a critical stage for any new venture, a period when entrepreneurs need guidance as well as capital and that's where we felt we could add strategic value, helping them grow their businesses to become attractive to VC funds for series A rounds and beyond.

One example of our contribution in the early development stage is the successful evolution of SatoshiPay, a company offering micro-payment solutions to content publishers in which Coinsilium invested in 2015. We helped its founding team with the positioning and commercial strategy for its first solutions until we exited, two years after our initial investment, at a significant premium. Since then, SatoshiPay has succeeded in raising additional funds and achieving ambitious milestones. Post-series A funding is a highly competitive market for professional investors, as only a tiny number of seed-funded companies will ever make it past the series A bottleneck; therefore, it is essential for Coinsilium to select the right companies with the potential to go beyond series A in order to produce asymmetrical returns for our shareholders.

One of our main sources of investment opportunities has been our own network of blockchain entrepreneurs and developers, built over the past seven years. I can highlight early contacts with entrepreneurs such as David Moskowitz whom I have known since 2013 and who co-founded Indorse, a skill validation platform in which Coinsilium invested in 2017. Indorse now serves Fortune 500 companies and last year closed a funding round with India's largest media house at a valuation representing a 350% uplift since our initial investment. Similarly, my first contact with Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar was in 2013, when he was a leading cryptocurrency advocate in Latin America; Coinsilium supported Diego's venture three years later when he cofounded RSK, a smart contract platform secured by the bitcoin blockchain, which is now a company with more than 100 staff.

Coinsilium investment strategy is region-agnostic, we have invested in companies with teams around the world; talent knows no frontiers, and neither do blockchain projects.

We see 2020 as the year when blockchain projects move from experiments and proofs of concept to mainstream applications in large markets. The next wave of users will not be tech experts or traders, they will be everyday people oblivious to the technology enabling the services they need to finance their businesses, send money overseas or for protecting their savings from erosion by inflation. In the next couple of years, we will see blockchain companies we have supported since day one transforming from trendy startups to commercially sustainable providers of services that can change the lives of millions for the better.

Eddy Travia, Chief Executive at Coinsilium.

For further information visit https://www.coinsilium.com

(c) 2020 City A.M., source Newspaper