Dear Current and Prospective Investors,
Great news! We’ve completed our prototype and now have working MVP implementations on Ethereum and on Stacks.
We’re also close to finalizing our pre-seed round. We are raising $250k additional capital and are in process with several pre-seed funds.
There is a lot of exciting news to share, so instead of updating you quarterly, I am sending this newsletter monthly.
For reference, our previous Investor Update (Q3 2022) can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CQqXaBAZ6PWP8nLhcCDrMlL3WdpL5ZhIJsc-SAjvm64/edit
Overview
On October 20, we completed our MVP. We ran a full, end-to-end DLC flow and moved Bitcoin using conditional logic, fully running on our infrastructure!
See a mockup of our UX here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9RDzi2WZYc
In partnership with Arkadiko, we’re on track to launch our first alpha in production in late Q4
Sales and Business Development
We’ve continued building our partnerships with chains (Avalanche, Optimism, Cosmos, Solana, Ripple) as well as with large web3 entities (Chainlink, Trust Machines, Jane Street crypto)
We’ve issued a proposal to Trust Machines to provide consulting in the area of DLCs as it relates to their upcoming sBTC token.
We hope to be more directly helpful to Trust Machines and the Stacks community
We have an exciting new opportunity to partner with Chainlink’s Proof of Reserve team to launch a Bitcoin hashrate loan product targeted to miners.
This is a project that Chainlink is working on with AAVE and Compound, the two largest lenders in web3
Across all other chains, we’re in active conversations with 24 other prospects. Prospective customers include Propine, Thales, Mars Protocol, Yeti Finance, Algomint, BenQi, Foundry Digital and more
On the wallet side, we have a soft commitment from Xverse (a multichain wallet) to start looking into implementation this Q4 with a completed implementation in Q1.
Xverse is already a popular wallet, and its integration of the DLC signing flow will position it as a wallet of choice for our partners
Recent Quotes
A few recent quotes from our fans. These comments have not been cleared for use in marketing, so please don’t share or post publicly.
"You're basically enabling a credit market on Bitcoin" - Felix Schmidt, former Chief Investment Officer at a large investment fund
“You’re one of the better entrepreneurs out there – I can tell, and I’ve talked to thousands” – Charlie Songhurst, former Head of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft
“I think it’s a cool idea. People are hesitant to put wBTC even in Eth. In OP, you can see there’s not even $10-15Mn liquidity in there” -- Sonne (lender on Optimism)
“One of the most innovative projects we have seen recently" – VC Analyst at Jane Street Crypto
"You're sovereign Bitcoin for everything else” – Kingsway Capital
"I think this is awesome. This is exactly what people should be doing" – Udi Wertheimer, Bitcoin influencer
Media Mentions
On Oct 5, Brian Harrington interviewed the Three Musketeers, i.e. Aki, Jesse and Matt. View the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qmIPmGd4AM
Aki presented at Stacks Bitcoin Unleashed Conference on Oct 7. View here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAPdByP-0FA
See our full media list here: https://stonks.com/deal/dlclink
Product
Our first wallet is live! We now have the first independent DLC signing module that can be integrated into any Bitcoin wallet. We are now working on embedding this technology into production-level Bitcoin wallets
We are porting our smart contracts to Ethereum. Tomorrow (Nov 1), we will be presenting our MVP demo to Chainlink
We currently offer three smart contract types on Stacks. Developers can use these to fit them to their intended application. Read more here: https://www.dlc.link/blog/new-contract-types-on-stacks-testnet
We are working on designing a dlcBTC “proof of collateral” token that lenders and other applications can use to track how much BTC has been placed in escrow
Team
We held our first companywide strategic planning offsite in early October in Budapest. It was great to have the team together! See a photo of us here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CkOlJm1OjSa
Welcome Oliver and Daniel, two new engineers in our Budapest office!
Oliver is a senior engineer who formerly worked at a Hungarian startup that was acquired by Cloudera.
Daniel is our intern and recently graduated with high marks from a coding school
Finance and Fundraising
We have a new investor: Charlie Songhurst! A quick bio on Charlie: At 23, he reported to Bill Gates. By age 26, he was running all of corporate strategy for Microsoft.
He then was one of the first 10 major investors into Bitcoin (right when Naval was starting) and made a Billion there. Amazing person to have on our cap table and in our network
We’ve been admitted to the second cohort of the DraperX Bitcoin Studio. It will be an 8-week program, culminating in a pitch to Tim Draper on Jan 11. This will be a great opportunity to meet more Bitcoin+ people as well as Tim Draper himself
We’re working on receiving grants from Optimism. The grant will start as a $50k Partner grant from OP Labs directly, potentially followed by a larger ($100k-200k) Governance grant from their community
We are closing out our $1Mn pre-seed round. As of today, there is $250k left to fill. The primary goal of this round is to extend runway into next summer and beyond
On Nov 4, we will be presenting at GSD Ventures’ Demo Day. Our presentation will be shown to over 300 prospective investors
How You Can Help
We always appreciate introductions to investment funds, blockchains and prospective customers. When making an intro, feel free to send the following:
Overview of current pre-seed round: https://stonks.com/deal/dlclink
Best,
Aki
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