Dear Current and Prospective Investors,
It’s frequently pointed out that bear markets are great for building. And a great time for launching new, game-changing capabilities! After over a year of development, we are now starting to launch our first products:
We’re delighted to announce our integration with Xverse! Read it here: https://twitter.com/AkiBalogh/status/1631011333385887744
We’ve also launched our first demo application, which lets users lock Bitcoin to mint a “Proof of Collateral” deposit NFT on Ethereum:
Next, we will be launching our lender integrations. Currently Arkadiko.finance (on Stacks) and Arcade.xyz (on Ethereum) are the forerunners.
But we plan to see a lot more interesting applications and use cases emerge through the spring and summer.
Having built a previous business – one with patented IP, a great company culture and a well-oiled sales & marketing machine – I can tell you from personal experience that dlcBTC is moving at lightning speed. I’m excited to have you along for the ride.
We're finalizing participants in our $750k Pre-seed round. If we haven't spoken yet, message me! We will close our round this month.
Overview
Xverse, a Bitcoin/Stacks multichain wallet, has announced their dlcBTC integration! The joint product will be available in production in March. This implementation lets XVerse wallets create Bitcoin DLC “escrows”, which will power our app ecosystem
Arkadiko, a lender on Stacks, will be launching their integration shortly after. Tentative timeframe could be as early as March. Philip, CEO of Arkadiko said: “Our partnership with dlcBTC allows us to use native Bitcoin in our lending solution. Arkadiko is the first lending/borrowing platform at scale to offer a native Bitcoin integration”
Project Orange is the codename for our first EVM application: a demo app that lets Bitcoin be locked to mint a Bitcoin-backed “Proof of Collateral” NFT, which can be lent against. We’re exploring various partners for this, with Arcade.xyz, Bridgesplit, Sodium.fi and others
We’re forming a strategic partnership with Chainlink. In return for a revenue share, we’ll be getting their help on events, hackathons, co-marketing, introductions and solution architecture from their internal teams (Proof of Reserve, Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, etc.)
Sales and Business Development
We’re in active conversations with pilots across both DeFi and CeFi.
Prospective customers include lenders (BenQi, Sonne, Arcade, Bridgesplit), market makers (FalconX) and liquidity providers such as insurance carriers (Nimble Insurance, Standard Re) and digital asset custodians (Propine, NYDIG, Anchorage, Brane)
Foundry Digital (largest mining pool in North America) are considering offering lending services for their miners, built right into their UI. Integrating dlcBTC would let them offer these services in a non-custodial fashion.
They’ve even recently organized an internal hackathon on DLCs! We’re excited about this partnership as they are intimately familiar with pain points faced by institutional miners
We are deepening our relationship with Propine, a leading custodian based in Singapore. They are interested in looping us into several pilots starting as early as Q2.
They’re also interested in bringing in partners so as to develop more sophisticated joint offerings as well
We’re partnering with Bridgesplit, an NFT lender on Solana, to pitch the Solana Foundation.
The Solana Foundation is looking to bring on multiple forms of wrapped Bitcoin after the depeg of FTX-backed SolletBTC last fall
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 them publicly.
“I think what you’re doing is super interesting. You’re taking risk out of lending and bringing in governance. I think it’s long overdue. I think this will be super-essential for custodians to get involved with” — Tuhina, CEO of Propine
“Miners need help that DLCs can directly provide. I think the approach you’re taking is the right one” – Brian Groll, CTO at NYDIG
“You’re enabling a money market on Bitcoin” – Ryan Terribilini, Algorand Ventures
"The longevity of this solution is outstanding. This lets Bitcoin be used in so many ways. I think this is revolutionary." – An Executive at Chainlink
"Taking Bitcoin, which is decentralized, and giving it to centralized custodians to use in decentralized finance -- is stupid in so many ways" – Alex Baghdjian, Funday
“You’re making Bitcoin more composable & usable in DeFi. DLCs make it more transparent and secure so that AAVE/Compound uses it as a circuit breaker” – Michael Imperiale, Chainlink Proof of Reserve
"You're sovereign Bitcoin for everything else” – Kingsway Capital
Marketing and PR
We’ve launched our Lightpaper! Read the latest at: https://docs.dlc.link/whitepaper
We’ve been seeing great success with our content in general, but our eBook on “How to Enable Bitcoin on Ethereum Without Wrapping” has been our most popular download. Grab your copy here: https://go.dlc.link/how-to-enable-bitcoin-on-ethereum-without-wrapping
The Blockopedia recently published an interview with Aki where he reiterates our vision. Read it here: https://theblockopedia.com/interview-with-aki-balogh-founder-of-dlc-link
Aki and Matt were recently featured in several Twitter Spaces focused on Ordinals. Over 750 people were in the audience.
Ordinals are a hot topic that have brought large audiences to Bitcoin and to Stacks, and we’re grateful for the additional visibility
Finally, we are planning a large announcement paired with a hackathon in Q2. This will be a major opportunity to get in front of tens of thousands of developers. Stay tuned for more!
Product
We’ve launched our ERC-721 “Non-Fungible Escrow” (NFE) token. Using this, we’ve launched an application that lets users lock Bitcoin on-chain and mint an NFT on Ethereum that can be lent against or traded.
View our announcement and video here: https://twitter.com/DLC_Link/status/1626192635437191168
We are also exploring other token standards, including vaults, soulbound tokens, semi-fungible tokens and other approaches to fractionalize NFTs
Team
We’ve brought on a new advisor – Seena Foroutan!
Seena formerly served as Global Head of Enterprise & Emerging Markets Development at Chainlink and formerly served as GTM lead at Coinbase, which he joined through their Earn.com acquisition.
He is helping guide our sales strategy by focusing on institutional lending and trading markets including custodians, credit trading desks, banks and market makers
Finance and Fundraising
At DraperX Bitcoin Studio’s Demo Day, I presented to 67 investors plus legendary investor Tim Draper as well. The presentation was well-received and resulted in follow-up conversations with about 15 funds.
You can watch the 8-minute video recording here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BXpvl3ehkFKIICnu-N4KbIKyM4DPYYSO/view?usp=share_link
Due to broad interest, we’ve expanded our SPV with DraperX to $750k. The SPV can accept checks as small as $5k.
To join the syndicate, download the DraperX app (https://linktr.ee/draperx) and join with code “BitcoinNetwork”
For funds seeking to deploy $500k or more, please keep in touch and we’re looking forward to further conversations in our seed round starting later this year
How You Can Help
Please refer us broadly! We’d love to meet VC funds and angels who are interested in our Pre-seed round.
In addition, we always love to meet app developers interested in building native Bitcoin support into their EVM applications.
Finally, we’d love to talk to institutions with large amounts of Bitcoin, including Bitcoin miners and mining pools, custodians, credit trading desks and hedge funds.
Best,
Aki
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