Investing in Web3 with Blossom Capital

After 2 years or hosting virtual events, Startup Grind are very happy to announce that our next event will be happening in person! 🎉

On the 24th February from 5pm we will be hosting in-person fireside chat “Investing in Web3 with Blossom Capital”. You will also be able to watch the live stream and engage by asking questions online and we promise that the best questions will be answered.

London based VC Firm Blossom Capital has raised $432 million to back early-stage tech startups in Europe, a third of which has been earmarked for cryptocurrency infrastructure investments, founder Ophelia Brown will be joining us.

About Ophelia Brown

👉 Ophelia is a passionate technology investor and venture capitalist. In 2018 she co-founded Blossom Capital with a mission to bring a highly differentiated approach to early stage venture capital. Blossom’s mission is to supercharge the most visionary founders in Europe, enabling them to build companies which compete on a global scale.

👉 As a General Partner at LocalGlobe, she helped build their first institutional fund and invested in a number of exciting companies including Beamery, Cuvva, Debut, Echo, Tessian and Zego.

👉 In 2016, with the mission to improve the ratio of women in senior roles in technology startups, Ophelia founded ALT “Ambitious Ladies in Tech” – a mentor programme that matches junior women in technology start-ups with senior functional leaders to provide them with valuable coaching, skills development and networking. The network now counts over 65 mentees and 130 mentors, including executives from some of the world’s leading tech companies.

👉 Previously, Ophelia was with Index Ventures for four years where she led investments in Big Health, Call9, MarvelApp, Osper and Typeform and worked closely with Credit Benchmark, Peoplevox and Robinhood.

👉 Ophelia was named by Forbes magazine as a rising star in its inaugural Europe 30 Under 30.

Watch the video from 2016 with Mike Butcher & Ophelia Brown:

The Web3 evolution will fundamentally change how startups achieve success

We are excited to celebrate Web3 Month in February. Our mission is to educate, connect, and explore the next wave of the web. We’ll be hosting virtual events all month long with founders, investors, Thought Leaders, evangelists and creators around the globe. If you’re looking to bridge the knowledge gap from web2 to web3.

WEB3

A new version of the web has been making some noise in recent times and for many, this is the first time they would have heard about the fact that there are different versions of the web as we know it. The new version is called “Web 3.0,” also known as “Web3.” Cryptocurrency is the underlying force of Web3, the asset class laying the foundation for a decentralised, autonomous network, free from corporate governance.

NFT’s

A non-fungible token is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable being used to store photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files, even real estate. Access to any copy of the original file is not restricted to the buyer of the NFT. While copies of these digital items are available for anyone to obtain, NFTs are tracked on blockchains to provide the owner with a proof of ownership that is separate from copyright.

The fourth oldest auction house founded in 1731, Sotheby’s auctioned a digital art piece, an NFT, for the first time ever on Thursday 11th March 2021 for just over $60 million dollars by a not so well known artist, Beeple. Bidding for “Everydays: The first 5000 days” started at just $100 but a sudden flurry of bidding towards the end prompted a two minute extension. Rebecca Riegelhaupt, a Christie’s spokeswoman, said “33 active bidders contested the work and the result was the third-highest auction price achieved for a living artist”.

NFT Sales In 2021 Were More Than $17 BILLION

DAO’s

A “Decentralised Autonomous Organisation,” is a new form of scalable, open, self-organised network that is coordinated by crypto-economic incentives as well as self-executing code on the blockchain to achieve common goals. Ultimately, a DAO is governed entirely by its individual members who collectively make critical decisions about the future of the project. The community members create proposals about the future operations of the protocol and vote on each proposal. In order for proposals to be executed into a smart contract they must achieve some predefined level of consensus. Each individual member of the DAO oversees the protocol at some level, giving way to community collaboration under this framework.

The following stage is around raising funds – DAO funding and how to grant governance.. This is ordinarily accomplished through token issuance, by which the protocol sells tokens to raise assets and fill the DAO treasury. As a trade-off for their fiat, token holders are given certain democratic privileges, typically corresponding to their holdings. When subsidisation is finished, the DAO is prepared for implementation.