A note from Alan
There’s no hiding from it: the last three months have been some of the toughest in the blockchain industry since I entered it ten years ago.
The one question I always get asked, whether I’m speaking to an investor, journalist or fellow blockchain founder, is “what impact has the current landscape had on you?”
In many ways, we’ve been very fortunate. We work primarily with enterprises, who generally have larger R&D budgets for innovative activities like blockchain projects, and look at returns on their investments over a time scale of years, rather than months. This has meant that our client sales cycles have been largely unaffected by recent events.
I also make it a priority to make prudent decisions in times of abundance as well as those of scarcity, so our runway offered us some buffer.
Looking at the bigger picture, it’s not all doom and gloom.
I have survived three crypto winters now (so has Aventus – we’ve been through a lot together) and if there’s one thing they’ve taught me, it’s that sometimes you have to take a few steps back to take major leaps forward – whether on a company or industry level.
It’s like medicine: hard to swallow in the short term, but good for you in the long term. And ultimately, it will weed out the projects with poor fundamentals, who were relying on hype among the media and an inflated market to carry them – making more space for those of us who have been ensuring we have robust foundations to rely on.
Client
Corner
We announced two new clients this quarter across the entertainment and financial services sectors. As we continue with our enterprise client strategy, we expect to have announced multiple additional enterprise clients by the end of next quarter, as well as a number of strategic partnerships.
Beatport: NFT marketplace for home of EDM creators
Beatport is the worldwide home of electronic music for DJs, producers, and their fans, with offices in Berlin, Brighton, Denver, and Los Angeles and catalogs comprising more than 16 million tracks and existing relationships with over 91,000 record labels.
We onboarded Beatport as a client in February to create Beatport.io, an NFT marketplace and community for creators of the platform and their fans. The partnership is an exclusive multi-year deal, in collaboration with Polkadot.
Nexos Technologies: Next generation blockchain solutions for digital payments & banking
Nexos Technologies is a digital payments and banking platform with deep domain expertise in open banking and payment solutions.
Nexos engaged Aventus to explore the design, technology, settlement and regulatory requirements of fiat-crypto data and payments bridges. These bridges, which will link various fiat payment and banking infrastructures to the Aventus blockspace, will enable the development of a hybrid distributed ledger technology protocol and platform to deliver digital banking and payment enabled services for both conventional businesses and use cases as well as new emerging businesses and Web3 ecosystems.
Marketing Milestones
We have closely aligned our marketing with our enterprise client strategy. We have seen significant results already, which we expect to grow as we enter Q2.
Enterprise blockchain roundtable
We held our inaugural enterprise blockchain roundtable, as part of our mission to educate enterprises on the benefits of Web3 in a commercial setting and remove the fear barrier – knowledge is power, after all.
Aventus Founder & CEO Alan Vey was joined by Walter Kok, Chairman of the Board at EnergyWeb, Lori Thomas, Senior Vice President – Strategic Engagement & Transformation at MetTel, and Peter Ruchatz, Chief Marketing Officer at Polkadot, to discuss what exactly Web3 and blockchain means when it comes to enterprise use, some of the barriers that enterprises may face, and the best approaches to enterprise blockchain adoption to ensure success.
We’re thrilled to report that the roundtable was a huge success, and have now begun planning a Q2 roundtable.
April conference circuit
Over the last three years, video calls and virtual events have become the norm. But things are slowly returning to ‘normal’, and there’s nothing quite like meeting in person.
We will be taking part in a total of four conferences in April: NFT.NYC, CoinDesk Consensus, MetTel Innovation Summit & Decentralized Lugano.
The range of focus points will allow us to meet potential enterprise clients and strategic partners, blockchain industry heavyweights and investors.
Tech Time
The Aventus Network is an instantiation of our blockspace offering, where any clients who aren’t ready to leverage their own blockspace offering can trial the solution. We are consistently improving the decentralization and interoperability of the Aventus Network.
Improving interoperability with the wider Polkadot ecosystem
Aventus is now integrated with Polkadot.js mainnet and public testnet (Rococo). This means that anyone from the public can connect to the Aventus Network parachain and read data independently. Additionally, we have also enabled AVT transfer transactions to be executed via Polkadot.js.
Increasing decentralization of the Aventus Network
We launched our Lowering Dapp, which allows holders of any tokens created on the Aventus Network (including AVT, PIP and VOW), to move their tokens from the Aventus Network to Ethereum.
