According to a blog post published by the company on Oct. 7, mining giant Bitmain, startup accelerator Y Combinator, blockchain development firm BitFury, Arrington XRP Capital, Notation Capital and many other companies were among the participants. It is also noted that they purchased 8% of the initial supply of NU tokens in total.
Blockchain platform NuCypher has closed a professional staking funding round of over $10.675 million led by capital market firm Polychain Capital.
Furthermore, the investors reportedly also agreed to stage-lock their tokens for two years, which the platform believes will guarantee “a high level of stability and professional service to the NuCypher network.” All the investors in question have also committed to run the NuCypher’s nodes.
Public testnet launch
In the same blog post, NuCypher also announced the launch of its public testnet – the Ethereum Görli network. Users can also request testnet tokens for staking in the company’s Discord channel. The startup concludes:
“From here, we have a relatively clear road from public testnet to incentivized testnet to WorkLock token distribution to mainnet launch!”
According to company information website Crunchbase, NuCypher has obtained $15.9 million in funding so far and is developing a network that “gives developers a way to store, share, and manage private data on the public” networks.
As Cointelegraph recently reported, blockchain solution company Oneiro also secured a $5 million investment from Cosimo Ventures.
Blockchain Music Streaming Startup Unveils Source Code, Incentives
Audius, a blockchain startup that aims to disrupt the music streaming industry, has uploaded its public beta version.
The open source code for public use of Audius is available on GitHub as of Aug. 15. Additionally, the startup has issued an open invitation to run network nodes in exchange for compound rewards distributed in Audius’ native token.
Decrypt reported the startup’s recent developments on Aug. 15. According to Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg, Amazon Web Services is one provider that users can take advantage of to run a node for the music network for staking. Rumburg explained that “every time a user listens to something and is paying an artist, a percentage of that payment is dumped into a pool that is then distributed to stakers of the Audius token.”
Early node providers will also reportedly be able to get in on the testnet at a discount, since they are allowed to ignore the service’s minimum token-staking requirement. Additionally, these early adopters will apparently receive certain benefits that the company is purportedly legally unable to mention.
Per the report, Audius has so far received $5 million in funding from a number of venture capital firms, including General Catalyst, Lightspeed and Pantera Capital. The startup is now aiming to launch its public beta by the end of September, which is a development stage for the company to invite more artists and users to the network.
Eliminating the middlemen in music
Decrypt describes Audius as a company aiming to eliminate middlemen in the music sector. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin suggested in March that blockchain technology could be used to this effect, for the benefit of artists. Lubin remarked:
“I think artists in the music industry on average capture about 11 or 12 percent of the value in the industry and those big record companies are sucking up 70 or so percent. We can replace those record companies with smart contracts on the Ethereum platform.”
Blockchain For Ethical Practices Raises $4 Million in Seed Funding
A blockchain startup for ethical supply chain management just raised $4 million in seed money.
OpenSC, a joint venture of the Boston Consulting Group and environmental protection group the World Wide Fund, announced today $4 million in seed funding from investor Christian Wenger. OpenSC uses blockchain technology to track goods for ethical malpractice.
The capital will be used to further develop blockchain-based supply chains such as overfishing and human rights violations, incoming OpenSC CEO Markus Mutz told CoinDesk. With the funding, Mutz left his role as a director at BCG Digital Ventures to be the full-time CEO of OpenSC.
The funding round came on the heels of its international pilot project with Austral Fisheries, one of the world’s largest seafood companies. OpenSC helps Austral monitor the fishing process of its Patagonian Toothfish – more commonly known as the Chilean sea bass.
The fishery company collects data from fishing boats’ GPS and put the fishing locations in the blockchain platform through an automated algorithm.
Retailers and customers throughout the supply chain can learn where the fish are caught and who catches them by scanning the QR code on the products, Mutz said. The blockchain platform will increase transparency between suppliers and customers throughout a supply chain so that it will be easier to monitor the whole process.
Mutz said the company will also work with Nestlé to trace the food company’s milk products from farmers in New Zealand to customers in Middle East and palm oil sourced in the Americas.
The Nestlé project will apply OpenSC’s blockchain technologies to a large-scale supply chain, which could serve as a model for other big companies, he said.
