As funding for web3 projects cools down during the crypto winter, startups in the space are increasingly focused on building bridges for mass adoption and looking for revenue opportunities to survive. What’s the key to driving mass adoption? It provides a seamless experience that users won’t even realize blockchain is involved.
One company demonstrating how blockchain can help in real life is Kansas-based Redeem. This allows users to claim non-fungible tokens using their phone number instead of setting up a crypto wallet. On the back of his recent $2.5 million pre-seed funding round led by Kenetic Capital, the startup is deploying his NFT solution to manage his VIP dinner at this week’s tech festival SXSW. .
Co-founder and CEO Toby Rush is a third-time entrepreneur, selling his biometric company EyeVerify to Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group for $100 million in 2016. Few companies in the world are as smart as Ant at building intuitive fintech products. Ant, along with his nemesis Tencent, has popularized the use of Scan to Pay to his over one billion people in China.
Rush was later acquired by Ant’s corporate venture team to focus on blockchain trading. It was an experience that paved the way for finding practical use cases for blockchain.
“As you know, cryptocurrencies are not allowed in China. The NFTs we have here are not really from China. Can we make it better? That was the focus of my investment,” Rush said in an interview with TechCrunch.
“When I started learning about blockchain, it was very practical and real. It wasn’t about how to trade NFTs or how to create new tokens, but what I would call the hardcore business case. was much more important,” he added.
Rush eventually identified a use case for NFTs and launched Redeem early last year. He admitted that he was fascinated by technology “not as photography, but as digital assets that you can live outside of the walled gardens of Apple, Google, Facebook, Ticketmaster or Visa.”
“Being able to own a little bit of data outside their walled garden allows so many other people to engage and collaborate with me in an open ecosystem.”
He believes the challenge with using NFTs is the onboarding process and how difficult it is to even use NFTs after onboarding. Instead of building an NFT infrastructure from scratch, Toby turned to an established and ubiquitous global directory system: phone numbers.
“Carriers have spent billions of dollars to ensure that there is now only one device in the world that can use my phone number. There are already 6.8 billion smartphones deployed. So take advantage of it. If you have a smartphone, you have a wallet,” he explained.
This is how Redeem leads users to web3 by opening their first wallet (gateway to all cryptocurrencies). Suppose you are attending an event that distributes NFTs as swag. First, scan her QR code with your mobile phone. Two links will pop up — Onboard via SMS or WhatsApp. When the user selects her WhatsApp, Redeem will automatically create a wallet on the backend, put the NFT into the wallet and send a message on his WhatsApp linking to the newly created wallet.
Basically, Redeem uses your phone number to authenticate you and create your own wallet. Rather than going through the process of signing up for a wallet and writing down a 16-word recovery phrase, it utilizes common methods of QR code scanning and text messaging.
“When you send a message, there’s only one device in the world that you can send a message from your mobile phone to, and that’s you. When you select your settings, the message is composed, so it’s pre-populated with who to send it to. This is what your request It’s an NFT to do, when you hit send your phone number is requesting this NFT, so once you create your wallet and send back your response, your onboarding is complete.”
This system can be used to authenticate people’s access to events as well. At his VIP dinner at SXSW, hosted by Arkive, a company building a decentralized museum, Redeem’s solution helps him verify the identities of some 200 attendees. Scan the QR code at the gate and Redeem’s backend will check if the wallet linked to the phone number has the required NFT ticket for her.
Redeem is trying to become a connectivity layer with a B2B2C strategy, rather than a wallet itself. A user can bind his wallet to his Redeem, be it Metamask or Phantom, as the default solution.
And why should event organizers use NFTs instead of traditional ticketing systems? The difference lies in the controls. In existing practice, a centralized ticketing enabler like Ticketmaster controls user data. web3 allows any group to engage with the audience through her NFT without asking permission from Ticketmaster.
Redeem has already caught the attention of event organizers. Rush declined to reveal who his company was talking to, but implied that they were “brands that do a lot of sponsorship, marketing and live events.” .
“So they want to have the activation onsite, but they don’t want the activation to stop onsite. There is,” says Rush.
