London, July 7th 2021
We’ve been silent, but finally the time has come for the announcement! Version 2 of Seed Venture has reached its final design after numerous consultations, in response to the rapid evolution of the market and its demand, and its development has already begun apace, behind the scenes!
But let’s proceed in order, with a recap of our focus.
THE NEW FINANCIAL MARKET: We have followed with delight the tumultuous developments of DeFi, of which we are pioneers, identifying the key elements of its growing success and learning from the experience of others. Decentralized finance recreates financial products (e.g. derivatives) and services (e.g. loans) in a completely new way, thanks to blockchain technology. An ecosystem aimed at innovating traditional finance, born to stay and grow very fast. The numbers attest to this: in the space of six months, the liquidity locked in the various protocols (liquidity pool, lending, yield farming) has broken through the $150 billion mark. The disruption is clear: liquidity is growing exponentially.
THE STARTUP WORLD: the hot topic of the last decade for investors and others. These are ideas born in garages, in the rooms of universities and even within companies by people who have decided to innovate. Ideas that in the space of 10 years, in certain cases, have had a significant impact in global terms, both social and economic (see Facebook). Ideas that have also seen investments by Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists, leading to stratospheric performances, and which have started to attract an increasingly varied audience, especially of non-professional investors (crowd investing). In the last twenty years, open innovation has led large companies to seek innovation externally, no longer and not only in their research and development departments, delegating it to start-ups. Open innovation, which is increasingly being pursued, gives start-ups a great deal of responsibility, which will have to be followed up with appropriate investment.
DeFi and startups are two fields that have in common the concept of innovation and experimentation: the basis for the perfect match, but one that does not take place. Version 2 of Seed Venture is the answer. Let’s see how:
REPUTATION: how can you convince someone to invest in an idea that has yet to prove itself, without knowing how good it is? The presence of a lead investor is the key element for two main reasons: in the early stage, it is the person who shows that he/she believes in the project, putting in the first capital and supporting it. In the final phase, i.e. the ‘exit’, he/she transfers the surplus-value to the token holders representing the start-up, first by holding the shares in his/her name and then by selling them. His reputation becomes an element of (often decisive) persuasion in financing the start-up.
THE BRIDGE: More and more investors, both retail and institutional, have started to buy and hold small shares of cryptocurrencies in their portfolios, and several are starting to trade thanks to fully decentralized mechanisms such as liquidity pools. Virtually all tokens represent blockchain-based startup projects whose business model is based on the token and its tokenomics. SEED Venture allows diversifying investments towards startups that *don’t* use blockchain technology, with the tokens being only used to represent the startups, giving access to a huge slice of investment opportunities given by potentially disruptive startups, not based on “tokenomics”. Thanks to Seed’s new design, the real economy meets the growing liquidity of the crypto world driven by decentralized finance.
INCENTIVES: Investors in the startups on the SEED Venture platform participate in a programmed rewarding: the first capital of the lead investor, converted into tokens native to the platform (SEED tokens) and subject to a lock-up period in a cashback vault, will be automatically distributed in the wallets of the startup’s backers. The distribution is programmed; the surprise could be the value of the SEED tokens released on that date, which could offset or even exceed the initial investment!
REAL LIQUIDITY: the challenge for any decentralized platform. We know how risky investments, especially if they are *illiquid*, deter most people. Without the presence of a secondary market, the crowd investing market cannot fulfil its potential. This is the central point of SEED Venture’s new design, which provides for the automatic creation of a secondary market for each token, in the form of a liquidity pool of the most efficient protocols of decentralized finance (Uniswap and similar) where the liquidity exchanged is billions of dollars.
TRADING IN DEFI: The exponential growth of decentralized finance is essentially due to one key aspect, true decentralization. Put simply, the exchange must be truly peer-to-peer and guided by rules that cannot be manipulated from the outside (e.g. by a regulator). SEED Venture’s new design allows token holders representing startups and traders to meet and freely exchange value, through wrapping mechanisms and without friction and conditioning with the underlying (the startups).
FEES TO SEEDERS: The community that supports the platform is made up of all holders of SEED tokens. They participate in the earnings of the “exits” of all the start-ups that raise funds through the platform and benefit from the liquidity fees generated by the operation of the system, all through a staking mechanism of the SEED tokens held. Staking SEED obviously prevents them from being sold: to each his own strategy!
WEB ACCESS TO SEED: user experience and user interface are crucial for the adoption of a decentralized platform, which must be accompanied by services that make it easy and intuitive to use. This is why the SEED team has decided to create a web gateway, a portal, which also operates with a decentralised logic that will provide an easy and satisfying user experience: just a few clicks to invest or raise capital. Try it yourself!
With this new design, SEED Venture is ready to respond to the growing needs of the market, and offer a new experience and new ways to participate in the investment of startups, which represent our future.
However, the innovations are not only technological but also concern people, partners and agreements: the go-to-market passes through the collaboration and support of strategic subjects, part of the ecosystem and the supply chain.
So stay tuned, we’ll be unveiling more news very soon!
