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Dave Hodgson of NEM Ventures guests on BNC podcast

NEM Ventures director Dave Hodgson speaks to NEM’s investments in Vimba and IoDLT and how its Catapult upgrade will accelerate the coming wave of interoperable blockchains. Plus the emerging Security Token Offering model - and the differences between ICOs, STOs and IEOs, on the latest episode of the Crypto Conversation podcast.

NEM Ventures is the venture capital and investment arm of the NEM blockchain ecosystem. Along with his co-founders, Dave Hodgson delivered a mandate from the NEM community to formalize what was initially a distributed, autonomous grant scheme into an investment vehicle.

Building the ecosystem

“The role of the fund is simple,” explained Hodgson on the Crypto Conversation podcast. “We’re looking to enhance the NEM ecosystem by investing in companies that either build on or add to the NEM ecosystem. If they’re not building on NEM, we then have more freedom to interpret what that contribution to the ecosystem might be. So, for example, it might be an infrastructure play where we work with a debit card that allows you to spend XEM.”

The fund’s first investment was in Vimba, an NZ-based start-up, and on the podcast, Dave announced the fund’s second investment is in IoDLT (Internet of Distributed Ledger Technologies), a B2B blockchain and IoT-based startup. IoDLT will utilize IoT and NEM Catapult to provide scalable, cost-effective B2B solutions that automate approaches to securely recording sensor-based IoT data directly to the blockchain.

“IoDLT is a young company out of Florida,” said Hodgson. “They’re building business-to-business applications with a combination of IoT devices and blockchain. The founder is a long term member of the NEM ecosystem and he has developed a system that can connect different types of sensors to an IoT device and have that device write directly to the blockchain. So those sensors could measure anything from a person’s blood sugar levels, to the temperature inside a shipping container, and they can do this without a central intermediary. So there are a lot of potential industry applications that we’re excited about and we expect to see a pilot launch in the health-care industry within the next 12 months.”

Interoperability is key

Hodgson also spoke about the upcoming release of Catapult, the update to the NEM blockchain, stating, “NEM version one had a bunch of great features that didn’t exist on most chains, and some of them still don’t exist on other chains. Being able to code in any language that a full stack developer is comfortable in, having on-chain multi-signature, being able to issue a token without a dev, all of that exists and will come across to Catapult.” Hodgson says he expects Catapult to launch on the public NEM chain late 2019 with new features like cross-chain atomic swaps between NEM private chains and public chains and also to Ethereum and Bitcoin – making for an easy transfer of data and value between chains.

In the medium term Hodgson says there are a number of blockchains competing with each other, but all will have a role to play in building out the wider ecosystem. “I think in the next wave, we’ll see blockchain projects prove themselves with interoperability and features like security token raises, or with genuine utility like we see with the Binance BNB token. Ultimately the biggest achievement for any new technology is when you get to the point that you are largely invisible to the end user, and the company that is offering the service has managed to hide that technology in such a way that all the user sees is the UX. For blockchain to get to that point, one of the key connectors is interoperability, along with scalability and security.

The Crypto Conversation podcast is available on Apple and Spotify. Or download every episode here.


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