Blockchain Innovation in Startups: 11 Companies Shaping the Ecosystem

Startups rise and fall everyday, but if your startup is on the blockchain, things are almost always looking up. It’s easy to say that most startups fail and blockchain is still an uncertain technology, but in terms of tractability, the technology itself is in a blue ocean, since its distributed nature invites collaboration between companies and individuals in the ecosystem.

For that reason, blockchain startups as a whole are in a unique position to reshape entire industries. And, while adoption by large corporations, such as that by Microsoft in partnership with Bank of America Merrill Lynch in June, has been forecasting comprehensive blockchain integration across tech companies and financial firms, the technology is still quite nascent and has lots of room to grow.

Financial executives, in particular, are extremely wary of small blockchain startup teams’ innovations due to the disintermediative property of the technology. If you give consumers full-service, financial firm-mimicking apps at little to no cost, and financial firms will become obsolete. Yet it’s not just financial firms that the technology is rattling. Here are 11 game-changing blockchain startups across industries poised to change the way we manage every part of our lives:

Consensys

Consensys is an Ethereum-enabled blockchain venture foundry, building Ethereum-powered companies and apps to create a decentralized computing ecosystem. Their goal is to create the next iteration of the internet, or Web 3.0, based entirely on blockchain technology. Its co-founders, Joseph Lubin and Vitalik Buterin, co-founded and invented Ethereum, and their expertise in this area will help them make this new venture as big of a success as Ethereum.

Digital Asset Holdings

Digital Asset Holdings, led by Blythe Masters—formerly JPMorgan’s youngest-ever Managing Director and pioneer of the credit default swap—builds distributed, encrypted processing tools to improve financial transaction efficiency and security. I wrote about this type of blockchain innovation in a previous article, which you can find here.

AxionV

AxionV is a new and smarter way to invest. It is an agile AI crypto fund that uses complex trading strategies that human investors simply cannot replicate. AxionV removes the human error from investing, and its team of experienced finance and tech industry leaders is sure to disrupt crypto spending as we know it. I got a sneak peek at AxionV at an event this summer. The AxionV ICO recently concluded after instituting a total investment cap, making it more exclusive and desirable than the countless other ICOs happening right now.

Funderbeam

Funderbeam is a blockchain-based stock exchange for funding early- and growth-stage companies, and equity trading as well. It offers smart contracts to shareholders and facilitates transactions across borders, using blockchain’s transparency and security to full effect.

Hijro

Hijro is a blockchain global trading and finance platform, allowing participants to optimize supply chain operations and working capital. Its marketplace functionality also allows financial institutions and businesses on every side to transact between one another. This type of disruption to the supply chain is desperately needed, and you can read more about how the industry will be disrupted in my article on blockchain innovation in the supply chain, here.

Blockstack

Blockstack is going further than perhaps every startup before it: it is using blockchain to decentralize the internet. The Blockstack platform allows developers to make serverless applications, freeing them from needing to run servers or keep daabases, and allowing users to control the data they put into such a decentralized internet. From a technical standpoint, the platform consists of a decentralized DNS and decentralized public key infrastructure.

Vida Identity

Vida Identity, as the name suggests, develops blockchain identity data security software to enterprise-level companies. The software circumvents company servers, allowing users to place user information on the blockchain. Managing user information like this decentralizes identity theft and fraud risk, empowering users to know their information is in their own hands.

Ripple

Ripple connects banks, payment providers, digital asset exchanges, and corporations via their proprietary technology, RippleNet, a blockchain-based payments network, to “provide one frictionless experience to send money globally.” As a cryptocurrency, it is #3 in market cap (behind only Ethereum and Bitcoin), and has been around since 2012. Ripple’s innovations will help it maintain its spot as one of the world’s top blockchain companies.

Symbiont

Symbiont develops blockchain-enabled capital markets smart contracts and distributed ledger products. Last month, it unveiled its Assembly blockchain, which is able to transact at 10,000x the speed of the Bitcoin blockchain. The company’s CEO, Adam Krellenstein, has publicly stated that Assembly’s transaction speed surpass even VisaNet’s, at 87,000 transactions per second. Its partners include the State of Delaware and Credit Suisse.

Canaan

Around since 2012, Canaan is the leader in blockchain server production and solution architecture, specializing in Bitcoin mining. In May, they raised $43 million to diversify the business, making that the largest-ever investment announced by a Bitcoin mining business. They are one of the largest makers of ASIC mining chips, and their diversification push has since been focused on software services and enterprise blockchain offerings.

BitFury

BitFury is the leading fully integrated Bitcoin and Blockchain security infrastructure provider, designing and developing industry-leading custom ASIC mining chips, PCB servers, and data centers focused on helping businesses, governments, organizations, and individuals securely move assets through the blockchain.

If you are looking to see how blockchain can impact your business, NYC-based BlockchainDriven is a leading blockchain consultancy firm that specialize in making blockchain a reality for small and medium sized companies. You can learn more here.