Hello 👋!

I didn’t think I’d be in your inbox three days on from Monday’s post, but I decided not to sit on this until Monday - who knows, maybe Thursday will become a fortnightly (dare I say weekly?!) occurrence with a specific theme - no promises!

Yesterday, I was able to attend a web3 Demo Day hosted by Techcrunch for twelve startups (chosen from approx 200), and I thought I’d pick the top four that interested me the most.

Let’s get to it!

My Top 4️⃣ Companies

Firstly, all the companies were great - I just resonated with some of them a little more - we all have our own flavours of ice cream, right?!

Let’s dive in (in no particular order):

#1 - Mentaport

❓ What: Mentaport enables the creation of context-aware smart contracts with a few lines of code.

🤔 OK, so what does all that mean:

• Blockchain gaming is going to be a big deal.

• Just like gaming in the real-world, real-world events and moments are going to play a big role.

• Another example would be if a museum decides to drop an NFT to everyone who visits in the week of 9th Jan 2023 - they could use Mentaport to set the time, location and who can download the NFT.

🤩 Why is this cool: Mentaport makes it super easy to make NFT’s more accessible to everyday folk - by making it simple for anyone to integrate NFT’s into their experience. Also, the founders - Cynthia Alexander and Mariale Montenegro - have the necessary AR & data science experience to make this a reality.

#2 - Holder

What: Holder is a web3 CRM and wallet data platform for the tokenized world.

OK, so what does all that mean: 

• CRM and marketing automation platforms are critical to managing your customer base

• Web3 means that some customer activities will be both on-chain (recorded on the blockchain) AND off-chain

• Holder allows companies to put together web3-enabled forms, enrich wallets with activity data and segment their audience based on on-chain and off-chain data.

🤩 Why this is cool: Data in a CRM is hard to manage - I feel I spent the past 9 years managing internal and external data, and web3 adds the fun layer of on-chain complexity - any tool that makes it easier in web3, is one I’ll be keeping an eye on 👀

#3 - Candy Shop

❓What: The one-stop-shop solution for creating an NFT marketplace.

🤔 OK, so what does all that mean:

• In a similar way to how most companies have an e-commerce shop on their website - think of this like the payment widget to enable NFT sales.

• Create your own store for users to buy and sell NFTs.

• Provide full on-chain transparency to your users through built-in records - making it easy to track actual ownership.

🤩 Why this is cool: Definitely one of my favourites - it’s basically the Shopify for NFTs.

#4 - Paloma

❓What: The fast blockchain messenger protocol to communicate across blockchains, instantly.

Eagle-eyed readers will remember we covered Paloma in September here:

🤔 OK, so what does all that mean:

• Messaging, in general, is hard

• Communicating across different blockchains with different messaging protocols and languages…and I can see why developers don’t want the headache

• Paloma is a cross-chain messaging system to deliver fast, secure messages across any blockchain, for no transaction fees.

• They’re optimizing for: security, scalability and speed - the holy grail of S’s.

🤩 Why this is cool: Messaging took a long time to figure out in the web2 world - Twilio became the de-facto communications protocol for anyone with an app that required sending notifications or interacting with a users’ device (think Uber, Lyft, Deliveroo etc). Paloma is built for the web3 world.

💥 Bonus:

Thought I’d list some of the other companies that took part yesterday (from what I remember - wasn’t able to catch them all) - check ‘em out:

• SmartPiggies - AN open source standard for a free peer-to-peer global derivatives market - SmartPiggies are digital contracts that provide their owners with protection, allowing them to behave as a price insurance policy.

• OmniX Labs - The first natively omnichain NFT platform and marketplace. NFT’s can co-exist in an interoperable manner.

• Coinfront - A platform that fully bridges business to web3 by allowing them to accept and manage any crypto in the easiest way possible.

• Verbwire - The universal API for web3 - building tools for developers to build decentralized applications.

• Knabu Distributed Systems - a token-driven development application to enable credible token projects.

That’s all! Let me know if you liked this interruption to your weekly Monday program and if I should do more commentary like this / a regular Thursday deep-dive. ✌️😀

Until next time 👋

I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition - I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two.

Got feedback? Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat.

Fahim