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A year ago, crypto was reaching ever new highs, and I was talking about whether ICOs would supplant the VC funding round and warning about Kim Jong Un’s crypto trading operations.

And then the world turned upside down.

Crypto prices are near rock bottom prices, with Bitcoin hanging around $4,000 and Ethereum around $113, down from their highs earlier this year of around $16,600 and $1,400 respectively.

While that has put a dampener on the enthusiasm of a lot of cryptocurrency retail investors, the bigger question is how do institutional players work through this market? What’s the strategy for finding value in this technology sector long-term?

I chatted with Alexander Liegl, who may just have at least part of the answer. He’s the founder of Layer1, which announced a $2.1 million fundraise this week from Peter Thiel, Digital Currency Group, and Jeffrey Tarrant.

Liegl saw a huge challenge in the blockchain and cryptocurrency spaces: too many good ideas and not enough developers working on product development work. So he decided to create an “activist fund for cryptocurrencies” that would “take concentrated bets on protocols that we think have a need in this world.” Layer1 then supplies developers and other experts to provide “infrastructure and support,” he explained. “An operating entity like us can have a lot of influence in moving the needle.” He describes Layer1 as “a combination of Polychain and Blockstreet” and “the Rocket Internet of crypto.”

That might sound vaguely similar to ConsenSys, the loosely-coupled group of startups and infrastructure engineers trying to build out Ethereum which has run into very hard times recently. Unlike ConsenSys, which was founded by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin and is directly focused on that ecosystem, Layer1 isn’t wedded to one blockchain or ecosystem, and instead selects a single project at a time through a mix of financial analysis and thesis development.

With capital in the bank, Layer1 has backed Grin as its first cryptocurrency. Grin is designed to be a completely private and censorship-resistant transaction medium, and Liegl says that “conceptually it really reconciles with our view in the space.” He particularly liked that Grin has an anonymous founder like Bitcoin, since no founder controls the governance of the project. Grin is intending to publicly launch in mid-January.

I asked Liegl how he was responding to the crypto crunch this year in the markets, and he considered it far more of an opportunity than a detriment to his work. “I’m really pumped about all of this,” he explained. “a lot of the bad actors have to be flushed out.” He noted that the low of the bear market may not be reached yet, but that Layer1 was in a good position to take advantage of the timing. “We raised the newest dollars, so we are not suffering from any of these ICO-induced problems,” he said.

Liegl, who graduated from Stanford in 2015 and briefly worked at Stanford’s endowment, has certainly seen the vagaries of the cryptocurrency markets. He learned about Bitcoin during its first popular run-up in 2013, even convincing his parents to invest in the budding project.

Now, he has his eyes set on Grin, and then additional projects. He thinks Layer1 will invest in a new project roughly every 6-9 months, which will accelerate over time with additional capital.

While these “platform” models have struggled a bit in the venture world, I think it’s reasonable that blockchain projects, which often suffer from a lack of attention from developers and end uses, could use a strong engineering and popularization boost. Layer1 isn’t the first in the blockchain world to take this approach nor I am sure will it be the last, but it might be just the ticket forward for a world that has struggled to pay its employees and bills in a crash.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2PTl0Xi

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A new startup using AI to look after elderly people at home has raised a new round of funding to apply its platform to detect changes in gait or behavior, falls or stumbles. In other words, it could start to predict changes in long-term health.

CherryHome, the home AI security system created by startup Cherry Labs, has raised $5.2 million in funding from GSR Ventures to drive the technology’s use for in-home senior care. CherryHome uses its proprietary computer vision algorithms to interpret camera data into virtual “skeletons.” These are used by the AI to understand and analyze home events and people’s behaviors, such as how someone might develop a limp over time, for instance.

The startup competes with Safely You, which sends alerts in response to very obvious falls; Nest and Lighthouse, which tend to only offer very basic AI over its imaging; and Amazon’s Ring, which only offers outdoor security.

With CherryHome, all information is processed locally, so the video doesn’t leave the house, while the senior citizen is replaced in the video with a virtual “stick-person” to preserve their privacy. This last aspect, in particular, is a really good idea.

With this new round of funding, CherryHome has signed pilot deals with TheraCare in-home care-giving service and TriCura, a tech ecosystem for care agencies. Both are based in the Bay Area.

Max Goncharov, CEO and co-founder of CherryHome says: “Understanding human behavior has a long list of applications, from home security to in-home senior care to the overall goal of making smart homes totally autonomous. But improving senior care is arguably one of the most important areas for technological improvement.” He says seniors currently make up 15 percent of the U.S. population, and by 2030, one in five Americans will be of retirement age. Several studies show the majority of those people wish to remain at home, as opposed to moving into an assisted-living facility.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2T3zpSq

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Meet Spot, a beautifully-designed mobile app to control your cryptocurrencies. Spot looks like a portfolio tracking app. But the company has built a strong foundation to add more features in the coming months. Spot wants to be your unique gateway to the world of cryptocurrencies.

“Spot’s vision isn’t to build a portfolio tracker — we went a bit overboard with this feature,” co-founder and CEO Edouard Steegmann told me. “Eventually, we want to become the app to manage all your cryptos, a sort of Revolut but with a crypto DNA.”

When you first install the app, you can connect it to your existing wallets by adding public addresses. Even if you store your tokens on a hardware wallet, Spot can read the public details of your wallet to show them in the app.

“We have our own nodes on Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Stellar and others to recover the amount on your wallet,” Steegmann said. Data is also cross-checked with third-party services to make sure that everything is fine.

Spot also lets you connect to an exchange account using API keys. Right now, the app supports Binance, Kraken, Bitfinex and Poloniex, but the company already plans to add more exchanges.

The app then gives you a detailed overview of your holdings across all services and wallets. You can see detailed charts, discover which token is performing better than the rest. It’s also one of the most well-designed mobile app I’ve seen this year — animations and interactions are gorgeous.

But Spot doesn’t rely on an API to get pricing information for each token. “We’ve rebuilt CoinMarketCap from the ground up, and we’re one of few companies that have done it,” Steegmann said. The company stores pricing information for dozens of tokens across 150 exchanges. That’s a lot of pairings.

If you tap on the Spot logo at the top of the app, you can see the maximum value of your portfolio if you cash out on exchanges with the highest prices for your tokens. The company makes sure that there’s enough volume to show you coherent prices.

Spot thinks that controlling your own data is too important to rely on API calls. When you have your own data, you don’t have any API rate limits, you don’t have a major dependency and you can scale more calmly.

Up next, you’ll be able to trade directly in the app. The company isn’t going to build its own exchange, but you can expect to buy and sell tokens on a third-party exchange without having to visit the website.

“We think that many things will be tokenized and that there’s no user-friendly interface to transfer, receive, buy and sell,” Steegmann said.

The company raised a $1.2 million round (€1.056 million to be exact) from Kima Ventures and business angels, including Eric Larchevêque and Thomas France from Ledger, Jean-Daniel Guyot, Thibaud Elzière, Eduardo Ronzano, Nicolas Steegmann, Sébastien Lucas and Nicolas Debock.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Sa4dRK

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We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off.

The event will be held at Work In Progress, 317 South 6th Street on Wed, January 9, 2019 between 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM PST.

There are only 200 tickets so if you want to come please pick one up ASAP. The meetup is open to everyone so head over if you’d like to talk tech. You can pick up a ticket here.

If you’d like to pitch at the event I’ll be picking ten companies who will have three minutes to pitch without slides. Since this is a hardware event I recommend bringing a few of your items to show off. If you’d like to pitch, fill this out and I will contact those who will be coming up on stage.

See you in the Big Easy!

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2V2njen