Vennd Powers Next Gen Crowd Funding

In wild west corner of the internet called digital currencies, one company, Vennd.io, is making life a little easier for Bitcoin’s potential to be unleashed.

One of the biggest hurdles to Bitcoin’s adoption is the fact that it still requires a technical mind to operate or develop additional services on top of. Commonly referred to as ‘NerdMoney’ Bitcoin requires developers to create the back-end tools and value-add services for non-technical Entreprenuers to build disruptive businesses.

You may know that ‘Bitcoin as a currency’ is just the 1st ‘app’ which runs on the Blockchain Technology behind Bitcoin.

What other apps are possible?

The innovation that is the peer-to-peer Blockchain Technology allows for endless apps to be built. Basically anything that revolves around an agreement or contract, where traditionally you would need to place trust in central authority, such as a bank to keep your money safe, a share-broker to give you the correct share certificates, or domain name registrar to correctly keep records of your domain ownership – can now be done without the need to trust a central authority – because there is no central authority, everything is decentralized.

Since Bitcoins success, developers have sought to create just such value-add tools by building ‘2.0 platforms’ which utilize Bitcoin’s Blockchain Technology.

One platform making massive inroads of late is Counterparty (XCP)

Counterparty is a Bitcoin 2.0 platform where information or rules are encoded on the Bitcoin Network – it allows anybody to ‘write a contract’ and once written, it sits on thousands of servers and is accessible from any internet connection to review but unable to be tampered with.

Again, operating in this space or ‘writing contracts/apps on the blockchain is very much in the realm of technically minded people and far away from mainstream adoption.

Until now.

Vennd.io makes the Counterparty protocol accessible as they do the hard work. Vennd is a better way to do simple BTC trades with Counterparty, it is only a matter of sending the asked amount of BTC to a normal BTC address, and you receive the Counterparty asset in turn.

Their name takes after a ‘Vending Machine’ which most people understand. A simple money in – value out philosophy.

Vennd.io acts as project managers for whatever your idea may be.

A real life example – a real vending machine:

The following concept, BlackBean is a simple example of how Vennd could ‘tokenize’ an asset.

In BlackBean’s case, It is literally a vending machine. BlackBean is an automated Coffee Vending machine, similar to those that adorn offices, petrol stations and hotels all around the world.

Say it’s founders wanted to purchase the machine and place it in a busy area but didn’t have the capital to make it happen. Vennd.io can create an assets for BlackBean on the Blockchain. This allows BlackBean to give up a % of future profits in this project to the holders of the BlackBean ‘coins’ in return for raising Bitcoin now to make the project happen via a Crowd-funding period. All completely decentralized and more importantly, automated.

You can get a lot more mileage out of Vennd for this than you might imagine. The mechanics look something like this:

1.) User makes selections for coffee and hits pay

2.) User selects currency they want to pay in (BTC, XCP, BLK, etc…) and a QR code is generated

3.) User scans code, sends payment, and coffee is dispensed

4.) Coins received (if not Bitcoin) are auto-sold on the open market for Bitcoin

5.) Token Holders (holders of BlackBean Coins) receive their share of Bitcoin instantly on every cup of coffee sold.

Goodbye brokers, fees, complications and any trust required in a central authority.

There are endless further customizations possible, such as pegging the price of the coffee to a Fiat Value – ie $0.50 for a cup of coffee – this is calculated against the current price of Bitcoin at the time of each transaction so the vendor always gets $0.50 and doesn’t lose money on Bitcoin’s price volatility. Other modifications can include what digital currencies are available, how often dividends is paid and if any % of profit is held back for company expansion.

Expanding a project would be just as easy:

Lets say I released a token for BlackBean which raised the funds for 2 more machines I could create a token for the 2 new machines and evenly distribute the 2 new tokens to the original BlackBean shareholders. This would be a smart way to do it as the Blockchain will be able to publicly show which machine is most profitable through showing dividends paid. Shareholders will also see dividends coming in for each individual machine.

This coffee machine example may one day happen and grow to 10,000 machines but for now servers an easy test-case to outline how the concept of Crowd-Funding, popularized by the now famous kickstarter.com, is one of the first big real life ways that Blockchain technology is disrupting real-world markets.

The term used in the Digital Currency community is Crowd-Coin-Funding, Assetization or Crypto-Equity depending on the legal and functional circumstances of each project.  You will be hearing a lot more of these terms in the future.

Vennd has project-managed a few notable projects to date including:

The ‘decentralized dropbox’ Storj, and the ‘Kickstarter of Bitcoin’ – Swarm – which both collectively raised more than $1 million through their vending machines.

Projects currently in development are:

• FoldingCoin (www.foldingcoin.net).
• Permacredits (www.permacredits.com),
• BitNPlay (www.bitnplay.eu),
• The Dream Channel (www.thedreamchannel.net)
• bitSIM (www.bitsim.co).

Furthermore, Vennd having done the ‘Tolkenization’ programming for Swarm + the relationship built there means Vennd is part of the Swarm platform. Every project launched on Swarm uses Vennd.io behind the scenes for their vending machine needs.

History & Inception of Vennd:

Vennd.io was founded together with Jonathan Briasco & Jeremy Lam in June, 2014. Vennd.io won a start up pitch competition in Inside Bitcoins, Melbourne and is currently preparing for a seed funding round.

BNC News had a chance to catch up with Jeremy Lam for a Q & A:

When and what brought about the inception of Vennd?

The development of Vennd started in March 2014, when Jeremy sought ways to increase adoption and liquidity to the Counterparty platform. The base code for Vennd was developed to create synthetic of BTC (XBTC) and a gateway system where people could exchange in and out of BTC and XBTC by simply sending the respective asset to a gateway address.

The idea of a digital vending machine soon followed, which is a specialized case of a gateway.

Where does the name come from?

The name ‘Vennd’ was an idea from Adam Krellenstein of Counterparty. The name ‘Vennd’  is both a mathematical pun on a venn diagram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram) and a play on words (vennd is a homonymn of vend).

• Note: ‘Vennd’ is the name of the product and ‘vennd.io’ is the name of the company.

What does Vennd do, in layman’s terms?

Vennd is like a digital vending machine for Counterparty (and we can support any Blockchain). You send BTC to the vending machine, and Vennd sends back the equity, commodity or token for a crypto Crowd-Funding. There is no simpler way to put your token/coin/asset up for sale than by using Vennd.

What’s on the cards for Vennd’s future?

There has been a raft of interest and we are working on a number of projects. There is 3 items I’d like to cover

1)      bitSIM announcement: (see article & Q&A on bitSIM here),

bitSIM will enable anyone with a mobile phone to securely own and perform Counterparty and Bitcoin transactions and streamline access and control of their Blockchain Assets. Vennd.io will provide the basis for liquidity providers to list their assets on a secondary market rather than a centralized registry. Details of the first instrument to be listed for sale will be released in the following weeks.

2)     The first real world application for Vennd is Crowd-Funding. Swarm is the first decentralized Crowd-Funding platform with a great front end and brand. Vennd will be creating the vending machine for each project on Swarm.

3)      Vennd is developing the ability for anyone to be able to fill out a series of questions on a web form and then automatically and cheaply create a vending machine.

With the global interest in Kickstarter type Crowd-Funding platforms over the last 5 years, a decentralized version (Swarm) will surely see some exponential interest in the coming months and years.

Every project launched on Swarm uses a Vending machine behind the scenes and we think this has massive potential for growth.

How does Vennd compares to existing options in Crowd-Funding?

When selling crypto-equity or crowdsale tokens with Vennd, the issuer can dynamically control the price in ways that were never possible before. For example, issuers can incentivize early adopters with a better price.

Thanks Jeremy

There has been increased interest in Bitcoin 2.0 platforms such as Counterparty over the last 9 months as more people see their potential as catalysis for Bitcoin’s mass adoption or great use it Bitcoins underlying Blockchain Technology.

Overstock, one of the largest retailers accepting Bitcoin as payment, announced a radical plan to build a completely decentralized stock-exchange by partnering with the founders of Counterparty. CEO Patrick Byrne was quoted saying:

…a new system based on the mathematics of the blockchain can eliminate holes in the stock market.

The holy-grail of Crowd-Funding.

Since this announcement, shares of XCP increased from $1.8 to $4 and have held their gains for the last 2 weeks.The values of all 2.0 crypto currencies and their market activities can be tracked in great detail on our Price Index Pages.

With the interest in Swarm since it’s successful Bitcoin IPO, we expect dozens if not hundreds more projects in the future. BNC will be tracking all assets values as they list.

Jeremy is an independent IT consultant in the investment banking industry. He has worked in investment banks in Tokyo, Europe, Singapore and Australia. For the last three years, Jeremy has worked in regulatory reform projects for the Dodd Frank act in areas such mandatory clearing, GTR reporting and SEF trading. This requires understanding of the front-to-back business processes, regulatory landscape and the underlying information systems. Jeremy specialises in the integration and configuration of interest rate and credit derivatives.