Blockchain is an emerging technology that's found adoption in a wide range of industries in the United States. While Europe is quickly catching up, we're still in the early stages and so there’s plenty of opportunities for businesses, investors and end-users to explore and grow within the space.
If you're a blockchain-based startup looking for funding or an investor scouting for new companies to add to your portfolio, you can apply to join InnMind's VC Pitching Sessions, created for startups all around the world. In the past year alone, startups in the InnMind community have raised over $47m to accelerate their growth and there is no sign of these investments slowing down.
InnMind is a VC and startup matching platform, focused on the world of Web3, which includes those based on blockchain technology. We are the the central hub, data source and deal-facilitator for Web3 startups and investors, accelerating data-driven decision making.
To further explore the innovation in this space, InnMind have put together this list of three fantastic European blockchain startups with exciting ideas that stand out in the crowd. The criteria is based on how recently they were founded, innovation within their business, products on offer, and route to market.
Elrond
Application: FinTech
Founded: 2017
Elrond is a Malta-based blockchain infrastructure built by a team of Romanian developers – Beniamin Mincu, Lucian Mincu, and Lucian Todea.
Elrond is currently the second Romanian unicorn after UiPath, and they launched the protocol to tackle the issue of blockchain scalability using the proof of stake consensus and sharding.
Sharding is a system of breaking up a large dataset and distributing the subset across multiple data nodes.
The Elrond protocol helps businesses achieve high scalability, through their smart contracts platform that's capable of executing 12,500 transactions per second, costing $0.001 per transaction.
And their sharding mechanism focuses on building a technology ecosystem to enable FinTech, DeFi, and Internet of Things applications perform faster transactions.
In their bid to give businesses easy access to the digital economy, they acquired Utrust, a blockchain platform for e-commerce merchants to receive payment in crypto.
The blockchain’s native token is EGLD.
Application: SecuriTech
Founded: 2021
Omnia Protocol is an Estonian-based decentralized cybersecurity infrastructure developed by two Romanian brothers – Cristian and Alexandru Lupascu.
The protocol focuses on providing on-chain and off-chain privacy to blockchain users and node operators so they can securely access the blockchain without attacks and external influences.
And how does it achieve this?
While one of the most interesting features of blockchain technology is decentralization, the network isn’t completely decentralized – meaning some centralized bodies influence the technology.
For example, almost 62% of nodes on the Ethereum blockchain are run on centralized cloud computing services like AWS. A change in company policy or power failure could affect or disrupt how these nodes verify blocks and transaction data.
Omnia’s infrastructure provides node operators a platform protected by privacy relayers to register their nodes. This solves the issue of centralization in the blockchain while providing security from hackers to node operators.
Also, there have been multiple occurrences of hacks and unchecked off-chain practices such as frontrunning, so end-users aren’t guaranteed security when accessing the blockchain. Omnia provides end-to-end privacy protection to ensure users' safety when accessing DApps.
They recently raised $3.2 million to fund their project.
Copper
Application: FinTech
Founded: 2018
Copper is a multi-award-winning London-based crypto-asset investment platform founded by Dmitry Tokarev that offers institutional investors trading, custody, and settlement solutions across over 450 crypto-assets.
Before Copper, many institutional asset managers couldn’t trade digital assets securely due to a lack of efficient infrastructure. Copper solved this by developing a range of products such as ClearLoop (an off-chain solution) and Walled Garden to facilitate secure and instant trades and settlements.
The platform uses multi-party computation cryptography to secure private keys and protect digital assets against cybercrime.
The startup raised $75 million in its Series B round. They’re planning on raising $500 million that’ll take the company’s valuation to $1 billion.
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