2022 Bitcoin And Nft Updates
It’s been over a year since my last article, so I figure it’s time for an update. This post is an intended provide a professional update for those interested.
I’ll start with a legacy update:
IDVPN.ca
In 2018-2019 I had the chance to build IDVPN to MVP. With my background of privacy and security, I never found an identity platform I was happy with, or even trusted. As someone who bought bitcoin sats from a few different places, I had to give my government issued ID to too many random companies, exchanges, and countries than I’m happy with.
It’s also obvious to everyone that companies and governments get hacked every day, so I wanted a way to de-risk that.
We built IDVPN in a way that you control the private key to your ID, to permit a claim. For example, in Canada, cannabis is legal but you have to be 18 and live in the province to purchase it. Imagine going to a provincial cannabis website and it prompts you for a claim “Are you 18 and live in B.C.?” you choose to answer the claim or not. If you agree with your private digital key, it looks at your ID and just says yes or no. It doesn’t disclose your age, location, or even your name. We assign what is technically called a UUID, otherwise known as a pseudonym like we now call you “Suzie Smith”. Now, when a company using IDVPN is hacked, they don’t really care and you don’t really care, as they only know Suzie likes that flavour.
It’s also an extensible platform and marketplace one can develop for. Let’s say you’re an AML/CTF compliance company, or you’re an NFT ticket provider, once integrated, your business and/or all of your business’ users can instantly access that extension in one click.
The goal for IDVPN.ca is to go open source in 2022 and decentralized in 2023. We’re about to do a raise for it, so if you’re an accredited investor, friend, or family member, reach out!
As for the new updates from the last year:
CoinOS.io
I’ve had the pleasure of joining Adam Soltys where I am now CEO and co-founder of CoinOS, the oldest web wallet for bitcoin, (and has since seamlessly integrated lightning and liquid networks) as well as offering the fastest to use point-of-sale for all three technologies you’ve ever seen. In September, CoinOS will be 10 years old! (There will be a party)
As of writing this, we’ve never charged a dime, and the code is completely open source. In the platform can also create liquid tokens, and we may or may not have built the capability to be a full bitcoin exchange as well as liquid token trading market platform – imagine a stock exchange where you can trade stablecoins (fiat currency like EUR, CAD and USD), stocks like TSLA, and you can even generate your own company or personal tokens, and these can all be exchanged in a single click. The exchange and market platform are turned off currently, but there is notable interest as of late.
We may have also achieved a first for all bitcoin exchanges in the last hour, but that won’t be disclosed for another couple months if we were successful, we’ll let you know SWIFTly once confirmed.
We are open to white labelling CoinOS as of 2022. Imagine we create a stablecoin, also known as a digital version, of your country’s currency. This is not the same as a Central Bank Digital Coin (CBDC) which just means government surveillance money that is the worst of all worlds. If you’re a nation state or notable financial institution (FI) in your country, reach out and join your peers in bitcoin adoption, don’t be left behind. If you have connections to securities regulators in your country, ask to learn more about our market.
TokenOcean.io
Last year we had the privledge of building what I believe is the first bitcoin (liquid) NFT marketplace – we did so under the agreement it would be open source. From there, we’ve had the opportunity to work with many large organizations and agencies, including the most popular men’s magazine in helping them launch their first NFTs on the platform. As we started to talk about NFT marketplaces, which we had built a few by the beginning of the 2021 NFT hype, we had a lot of organizations reaching out on what we could do for them – both big and small organizations. In the industry we would call this “product market fit” and from a startup perspective, it’s the best position to be in, we could barely keep up with demand. It wasn’t unsual to be hiring two people a week.
We had clients approaching us from every vertical – a tequila company, an agency, a movie producer, a video game company. From every angle we had the opportunity to think creatively on how NFTs could be used for their company’s benefit in the future, which is usually a combination of new marketing opportunities, future incentive and value capture that’s never been possible before. All of this software we’ve been building for anyone, on the condition that we only deal in open source software, so what we build for one client, our other clients can benefit from as well.
After a handful of NFT marketplace clients we decided to create a new company just for this purpose and we called it TokenOcean, dedicated to our bitcoin based white label NFT marketplaces and separating it from CoinOS the web wallet and PoS. To this day, we remain focused on trying to keep up with client demand.
IPDP.io
With our bitcoin (liquid) NFT work, we created the idea of bitcoin based NFT tickets. For example, you can’t watch Silhouettes, the feature film sci-fi movie, without an NFT ticket. There’s a lot of demand appearing for this quickly, from local events to stadiums and well known ticket providers.
The creator influencer economy today is cornered by American tech companies (Youtube, Instagram, Substack, Udemy) with the exception of Tiktok (China). Each platform regulates how you can make money, and their own community guidelines. We decided, why shouldn’t you be able to make however much you want, and build your own community guidelines for your creative content? From there, we’re announcing today, the InterPlanetary Distribution Portal or IPDP.
We talked about it, and we decided it’s not our job to hold stigma or judgement, as long as your content is legal, we’ll keep your distribution portal up. You can charge whatever you want in bitcoin, lightning, or liquid tokens, to access your content. You can livestream or host static content. It can be videos, live streams, pictures, or text based content, locked for your paying users.
For the aspiring entrepreneur, you could create your own version of one of these platforms not just for yourself, but as a competitor, and curate as you wish for many creative content providers. For the influencers, you can run your own portal solo. I’m personally the most bullish on this technology for influencers moving forward, there are so many innovative opportunities.
DigiDeeds.io
We have several real estate NFT marketplaces in our pipeline, doing several unique things. One thing we noticed is no one is doing the basics, make your property you own an NFT in terms of the deed, and put it up for a private sale. Most realtor led marketplaces limit you for 3 months to work with them, but imagine a platform where anyone could post their property and just leave it up until it privately sold. On the selling side, we currently don’t have fiat (CAD/USD) payment rails for the platform, you need to buy the properties with bitcoin. (If you’re worried about volatility, it’s easy to off-ramp to fiat at sale time)
As of writing this, we’re about to go live, and we have already had interest in a full buy-out of the platform before we go live by multiple parties. If you own a property, let’s say it’s worth 500k and you don’t even wanna sell, there’s some amount, let’s say 600k, that you would sell for and walk away. Why not post your property as a listing?
This doesn’t compete with our existing real estate NFT marketplace clients, who are doing things way above and beyond over the months ahead.
LICENSE
This week we changed the LICENSE for all of our software. Adam and I are aligned, anything we build will be open source for anyone to use with no barriers, a value we share. We added a dual licence in case a corporate entity making mad profits tries to leverage our hard work without giving us anything. We went with AGPLv3 and we’d like to add the caveat that if you’re a startup or entrepreneur, we’ll happily give you a license to use our code if you can’t afford it yet if you get written permission from us.
Summary
Well, it’s been one amazing year. Working with Adam has been amazing, we’re different in some ways and I respect him and will listen to him any time as I’ll probably learn something. This writes like a closing statement but it’s just opening. We have an epic team with create culture fit and value alignment in terms of open source and the future where bitcoin becomes ubiquitous with layer 2 and 3 just starting to hit the limelight.
About an hour ago I tried to summarize what aligns all of these projects to a new friend, and I want to make it clear to anyone who’s not yet heard about us as we’re usually heads down building the future:
We’re the open source white label SaaS solution for all things Bitcoin (including layer 2 Bitcoin).
If you can imagine it, we can build it. Even further than that, if you have the budget and drive, we can throw opportunities at you that align with your values and passions.
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