While many industries have seen a decline in venture capital investment, the blockchain space has continued to enjoy funding. Blockchain startups have found strength in the rise of NFT use cases alongside the convergence of blockchain and other emerging technologies like 5G, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Gartner predicts the business value generated by blockchain will increase, reaching $176 billion by 2025 and $3.1 trillion by 2030. In addition, Grand View Research estimates the global blockchain technology market will grow at a rate of 85.9% between 2022 and 2030. With the blockchain market capitalization poised to skyrocket in the next few years, investors continue to pour billions of dollars into blockchain and crypto startups.
Although the blockchain industry is currently seeing one of its harshest crypto winter seasons, its promise hasn’t stopped burgeoning. As the metaverse gains more inroads into the broader enterprise, investors continue to tap into the endless potentials of blockchain, moving its application far beyond cryptocurrencies, NFTs and any other singular unit.
A report by PwC on the outlook of the blockchain industry notes it as a technology enabler with an unrivaled capability to improve the business processes in the enterprise while simultaneously lowering the cost of trust. These advancements are touted to result in a greater return on investment (ROI) for first movers and the businesses they serve. Event
Register Here An industry continuously on the rise
Number of blockchain startups by year of founding (2008 – 2018) Source: IPlytics A report by Statista quoting IPlytic’s survey revealed that the rate of proliferation of blockchain startups globally has kept an upward momentum. The survey unveiled that while only 66 blockchain startups were founded worldwide in 2012, the number grew to 777 in 2017. Another Statista report places the amount of money that blockchain startups raised in the first quarter of 2021 at $2.6 billion globally — more than the total amount the industry raised in 2020.
Amidst surplus funding, how do startups in the blockchain space stack up? Which startups are jostling to get ahead and offer more to business leaders and consumers? Below are 10 blockchain startups well-positioned in the market based on their growth trajectories, service offerings, innovation and market capabilities to make a statement in the blockchain space over the next few years. As expected, these startups span the entire spectrum of the blockchain industry, from cryptocurrencies to decentralized finance ( DeFi ), NFTs, metaverse and Web3.
The CEOs of the startups spoke to VentureBeat on their core business competencies, providing key metrics for evaluation. In no particular order, below are 10 blockchain startups poised to lead the pack over the next few years. Fluree
Founded: 2016
Founder(s): Brian Platz
Headquarters: North Carolina, U.S.A.
Total funding to date: $6.5 million
Bringing data into the blockchain space, Fluree is an open-source graph database that guarantees data integrity, provides traceability into data provenance, facilitates secure data collaboration and powers connected data insights. Fluree is going after the general blockchain application market, focusing on becoming the data management infrastructure for Web3. While public blockchains like Ethereum provide application logic and decentralized file systems such as IPFS handle distributed storage, Fluree’s CEO, Brain Platz, said the company exists to fill the need for operational data management for Web3 applications.
Fluree brings a practical and familiar platform to enterprises looking to build blockchain applications. Enterprise applications require intensive data storage and retrieval — functionalities that traditional L1 or L2 blockchains are not optimized for. This includes for storing metadata around supply chain updates or user information for a customer web application. However, sticking the entire database functionality on Ethereum or Polkadot for blockchain applications is cost-prohibitive or downright impossible. So, according to Platz, most organizations just stick their data and metadata in a regular old database and use blockchain as yet another data silo. The lack of holistic data management defeats the original purpose by adding cost and complexity to the systems that this blockchain was meant to simplify.
There’s a need for a more evolved solution, said Platz and this is the solution Fluree brings to the enterprise. He said some benefits the Fluree brings to the blockchain industry include:
Data Integrity: Every piece of data, including its provenance and originator, is entirely verifiable and tamper-proof via cryptography. Optional decentralization enables increased integrity and visibility in networks.
Data Security: By encoding custom read and write permission logic as co-resident data, Fluree allows a singular security model that travels with your data beyond borders and scales […]
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