GetGems Forms Strategic Partnerships and Attracts VC Funding

GetGems is the new social messenger service which offers a secure Bitcoin wallet and rewards users of their messaging service with GEMZ – a cryptocurrency on top of the Bitcoin blockchain via Counterparty.

GetGems successfully completed their token sale on the 6th January and it was announced by Koinify via twitter that the final totals are 38,135,367 GEMZ sold for a total of 2,633 BTC and at today’s Bitcoin prices at $296 the final amount of token sale sits at US$780,000.

Earlier this week a press release stated that in addition to the Koinify crowdsale US$400,000 was invested by Magma VC bringing the total investment to over US$1 million. Magma Venture Partners is one of the leading venture capital firms in Israel and this is their first investment in the cryptospace. Their portfolio focuses on Information, Communication and Technology, and as it stands their choice to invest in GetGems should be a perfect fit.

"The Team and I are super excited to work with the people and resources of Magma VC. They are well known for their venture capital support for the ever popular Waze, another Israel based tech company”
— – Daniel Peled, CEO and co-founder at GetGems

Magma VC seeks out businesses in their early stages in the hopes to serve as a springboard for entrepreneurs as they evolve into industry leaders. Their support of Waze the navigation application resulted in an absolute win, as the application was bought by Google for over US$1.1 billion in 2013. “Our goal is to enable a flow of innovation from the earliest stage all the way through until a company realizes its potential reach.” – Magma

Other social messaging applications have seen great reward based on their user communications. WhatsApp was developed in 2009 by former employees of Yahoo Brian Acton and Jan Koum. Allegedly WhatsApp is expected to exceed 700 million users this month. Facebook’s takeover of the popular messaging system for US$19 billion in February 2014.

However, after the acquisition by Facebook, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service due to a service error as a result of a bad router taking out the servers. In response, users opted to try alternative instant messaging applications. Telegram reported on twitter that they received 4.95 million new users during this time frame.

Telegram, is the open source software which GetGems are using for the beta version of their Android application. Not only will users of GetGems have early access to the android version, which was intended to be released in June 2015, but they will also be able to communicate with Telegram users directly.

On the 8th of December 2014, Telegram advised that they reached 1 billion daily messages and 50 million monthly active users. It is these customers which GetGems hope will encourage the future growth and success of the peer to peer encrypted messaging sevice.

One might think that there may not be room for another IM company, given there are so many options. However, GetGems have a new angle. Social messaging networks profit from charging their users. WhatsApp charges a fee after one year of free service. However, in addition to being a free application, GetGems offers a wallet and plan to reward their users with GEMZ tokens.

Users are rewarded with GEMZ for their participation in the network in the following ways.

• Inviting friends to join
• Airdrop giveaways
• Advertisers pay into the network and users who choose to receive their sponsored messages tailored to their interests will also earn GEMZ rewards.

Other strategic partnerships have been in the works, including publicly released information in December that the GetGems team partnered up with the College Crypto Network (CCN). This partnership gave the 1 million students in over 150 Universities across the United States access to the crowdsale and a 9% bonus.

“Bringing Bitcoin to the masses. This is the most important challenge the crypto-currency community is facing today. We’ve designed GEMS from the ground up with this goal in mind.”
— – Peled

This news comes at an exciting time for the adoption of crypto technology. Outside investment of such quantities and strategic partnership planning indicates that mainstream mass adoption may not be far off, particularly in the communication industry driven by the people.