Ultrain Steams Ahead With NGC Investment
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Venture capitalists need to have nerves of steel to invest in the crypto space when times are tough, but not all of them do. One exception is NEO Global Capital, which has just backed Singapore-based Ultrain. The project plans to use the investment to build its next-generation cloud infrastructure, and it couldn’t have come at a better time as Ultrain prepares to deliver its Blockchain 3.0 platform to the business community.
NEO Global Capital is still pouring capital into new startups while other institutional investors have been running the other direction. Barry Silbert, at the helm of Digital Currency Group, witnessed six crypto deals come apart at the seams in the last month alone after the lead investor bailed. As ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees pointed out on Twitter, VC is supposed to be the “smart money,” but all too often it tends to follow the crowd.
That’s not the case for NGC, which boasts a war chest of $400 million in assets. A string of other high-profile institutional investors are also backing Ultrain including Arrington XRP Capital, Draper Dragon and DHVC. As of this summer, Ultrain was valued at $200 million.
Roger Lim, Founding Partner at NEO Global Capital, said in a statement that businesses looking to integrate the blockchain face hurdles such as “low throughput, smart contract performance, and security of traditional platforms,” issues that NGC believes Ultrain’s blockchain engine will solve.
Ultrain Competes To Lead Blockchain 3.0
Ultrain’s technology is designed to connect the business community to a new, enterprise-ready blockchain. On Dec. 1, they opened their testnet for the community and developers to experiment and deploy smart contracts before doing so in the real world. According to a recent press release, popular Ethereum-based dApp HyperDragons has begun deploying on Ultrain.
Ultrain is also behind the Random Proof of Stake (R-PoS) algorithm, which uses a random node selection method (rather than relying on trust) to ensure decentralization and bolster performance. Over the summer, Ultrain deployed 1,000 nodes to Amazon’s AWS, achieving an average of 3,000 transactions per second and a 10-second confirmation time. According to the company, that beats the performance of other blockchain-3.0 startups.
No FOMO in a Bear Market
Ultrain Co-Founder and CEO Rui Guo, who previously led Alibaba’s security department data platform, believes Ultrain’s mining rigs will help to bolster mainstream adoption of the blockchain over the next half-decade. Guo is among those in the blockchain community to be waiting for the next killer decentralized app to usher in a crypto bull market.
Meanwhile, NEO Global Capital’s Lim recently explained the dynamics of the bear market, saying there is less fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) while “projects best equipped with a ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality are the most likely to succeed.” The mettle of many of those projects is about to be tested in 2019.
The author is invested in ETH, which is mentioned in this article.
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