2019 came with a wave of global expansion for IOV Labs including the acquisition of Latin America’s largest social network Taringa, as well as the announcement of several acceleration programs around the world such as the RSK Ecosystem Fund based in San Francisco, Latin America´s acceleration program with NXTP and partnerships with Bynarystar (Japan’s largest blockchain accelerator) and Tribe, the first government-backed accelerator in Singapore.
We have made great progress in setting up the appropriate framework for a healthy ecosystem to grow by enabling different initiatives to flourish attracting companies around the world to bring their solutions and use cases to RSK.
Taringa Acquisition
During September we announced Taringa´s acquisition, the top Spanish-speaking social network in the world with 30 million users and over 1,000 active online communities. Having access to Taringa’s user base, will provide the organization with invaluable information and data to test and distribute new decentralized infrastructure and apps powered by the RSK/RIF platforms at a large scale. Jointly with Taringa’s leadership, IOV Labs plans to create innovative consumer products and services for its communities using RSK and RIF decentralized infrastructure.
Acceleration Programs
Ecosystem Fund: The San Francisco RSK Innovation Studio and RSK Ecosystem Fund were created to facilitate the creation of next-generation blockchain solutions in partnership with startups and enterprise companies. Focused entirely on new classes of services on top of Bitcoin, the Fund was launched in May and has recently announced the first round of investments awarded to Vega, Multis and Pocket Network. For further information, we invite you to visit: https://fund.rsk.co/.
NXTP Labs
The RSK Acceleration Program in partnership with NXTP Labs, was announced during September targeting start-ups and companies interested in developing their blockchain products or migrating them from “off-chain” to “on-chain”. The search will focus on Latin American start-ups (with varying degrees of maturity) which are developing innovative products or services that can be optimized by adopting RSK’S blockchain stack technologies.
More than 100 startups applied and expressed their interest in using our technology. We expect more applications and exciting projects to come next year!
We have also partnered with BinaryStar, the largest blockchain accelerator in Japan and Tribe (the first government-backed accelerator in Singapore) to keep expanding our presence in Asia.
Use Cases on RSK/RIF Platform
Several new use cases were launched on top of RSK/RIF platforms. Two great examples are SeSocio.com and Activos Marcos Paz.
New Developers Portal & Grants Program Launch
We have completely revamped our developers portal. With new tutorials, API references, direct support from the devs team and extensive code examples, we make the coding experience seamless. We have also launched our Grants Program with up to 200K USD to be awarded to provide funding.
Wallets
Edge, Cobo, Portis, Nifty, have all added themselves to the wide family of wallets that integrate our technology. That includes MyCrypto, MyEtherWallet, Trezor, Ledger, DCent, iBitcome and Jaxx Liberty.
New Swap Tool
We are launching the first swap tool with a major market player to facilitate the exchange between bitcoins (BTC) and Smart BTC (RBTC) at a very low cost, without KYC and through instant transactions. This is an additional faster alternative to the 2-way-peg. Additional information will be provided in our social network channels.
Stay tuned. Exciting times ahead!
