That’s where Codified, an early stage startup that was nurtured last year inside venture capital firm Madrona Ventures, comes into the picture.
The company was built from the ground up from a data veteran with an eye toward solving the data compliance problem, and today it announced a $4 million seed round.
Company founder and CEO Yatharth Gupta sees that data is at the center of today’s technology, yet companies struggle to control access to it.
Both jobs, he says, were heavily involved in data and he saw the kinds of problems he’s trying to solve with Codified.
Investors in today’s round include Vine Ventures, Soma Capital and Madrona Venture Labs where Codified incubated last year.
“Brand anchors” to gated areas like reward programs are something that companies will expand upon in 2024, he said.
“I think this year we’re going to see a lot of community-based brand building,” he shared on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
Starbucks launched Starbucks Odyssey in 2022 as its initial foray into the web3 world.
The experience combined the company’s Starbucks Reward loyalty program with NFTs to enhance customer experiences, TechCrunch previously reported.
This never would have happened if not for web3.”The loyalty program has a five-tiered system with over 58,000 active participants at least on level one, Kaczynski said.
Although Ripple has been around since 2012, it and the XRP Ledger are doubling down on its global payments journey.
At the same time, it’s also aiming to become the go-to enterprise infrastructure provider, the company’s president, Monica Long, said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
Distinct from the Ripple network and protocol, the XRP Ledger is a decentralized public ledger with an open source code base that anyone can contribute to or use, Long said.
“Foreign exchange is pretty concentrated in terms of the players who actually have enough capital to provide liquidity for those transactions,” Long said.
“And so when you have a lot of concentration, you have a lack of competitiveness for the pricing.”
It’s been a long road for spot bitcoin ETF filers – and today the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission finally approved all 11 standing applications from issuers.
“We always knew the investor sentiment would get there, regulators would get there and the financial advisor community would get there.”Grayscale, a digital asset investment firm that was one of the 11 firms to file for a bitcoin spot ETF, is best known for its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which has now been converted, or “uplisted,” into its new bitcoin spot ETF product.
The 10 other issuers are BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF, Bitwise Bitcoin ETP Trust, WisdomTree Bitcoin Fund, Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust, VanEck Bitcoin Trust, Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF, Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund, Hashdex Bitcoin ETF and Franklin Bitcoin ETF.
While futures ETFs marked a big milestone in 2021, Sonnenshein believes the most critical one that brought these bitcoin spot ETF approvals was the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in favor of Grayscale against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision in the case of a bitcoin spot ETF in the Summer of 2023.
