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- RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖Week of 01/16/24
RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖Week of 01/16/24
Team RBV Open Deals, Portfolio Updates, Crypto News, & More
Joshua Howard
January 16, 2025
RBV Weekly Newsletter 🧔📖 Week of 01/16/25: Open Deals, Portfolio Updates, Crypto News, & More
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Welcome to the latest edition of the Red Beard Ventures newsletter, where we dive into exciting updates and insights from all over blockchain, frontier tech, and the angel investing landscape.
📣 As a reminder, Red Beard Ventures has a syndicate, fund, and a tokenomics accelerator:
The Red Beard Ventures Syndicate is stage agnostic and invests in Frontier Technology with a focus on Web3, Space, FinTech, Sports, Robotics, Biotech, and Climate. We invest anywhere between $100k - $1.5M.
The Red Beard Ventures Fund I invests $100k - $1M in Pre-seed and Seed blockchain-based companies.
Denarii Labs is a tokenomics accelerator where we invest $100k into companies interested in designing and launching a token, over a twelve-week hands-on program. 🚨Applications are now open for Wire Accelerator, apply here! 🚨
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RBV Spotlight 🚀
Dfns, RBV’s portco and leading wallet infrastructure provider for crypto finance, has successfully raised $16M in a Series A funding round led by Further, the venture arm of Abu Dhabi’s largest sovereign wealth fund, ADQ. The round also saw participation from Motive Partners, Wintermute, and Motierventures, alongside trusted partners White Star Capital, Bpifrance, Hashed, Semantic Ventures, Techstars, and others. Dfns has achieved significant milestones, including serving 130+ clients across banking, payments, and custody, powering 10M wallets globally, and securing $1B in monthly transactions. The company remains focused on building secure, scalable infrastructure for financial institutions navigating blockchain-based systems. Looking ahead, Dfns plans to launch a groundbreaking Data Integrity Framework in Q2 2025 to bring bank-grade security to zero trust environments. They’re well on their way to redefining wallet security and scalability in the digital asset ecosystem.
Congrats to the Dfns team! 🎉
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Portfolio News
Eight 1 of 1 NBA Top Shot Rookie Moments from the 2024-25 season are up for auction, including debuts from Jaylen Wells (Memphis Grizzlies) and Jamal Shead (Toronto Raptors).
The auction is live now and closes on January 21 at 9 PM ET, offering fans a chance to own historic moments in basketball.
This collaboration highlights the future of digital collectibles, blending exclusivity and innovation in the sports world.
The funding supports integrating AI and predictive analytics to geolocate interference sources and predict patterns, enabling faster military decision-making.
CEO Tim Solms emphasized the global impact of GPS jamming on both military and civilian systems, including financial transactions and air traffic control.
The enhanced technology aims to protect critical infrastructure from growing GPS interference threats.
QMDB is a high performance verifiable database for blockchain state management.
Achieves 2.28M state updates per second and 1M TPS, with workloads up to 15B entries (10x Ethereum’s 2024 state) and scaling to 280B entries on a single server.
Scales efficiently across consumer grade and enterprise hardware and open-source under MIT and Apache-2 licenses.
Alto’s self directed IRA platform now connects with ACA’s network giving investors access to early stage opportunities with tax-advantaged retirement strategies.
The collaboration simplifies startup investing, providing streamlined processes, educational resources, and exclusive guidance for ACA members.
This partnership empowers investors to diversify their portfolios and optimize tax strategies with ease.
Quex now powers Celo’s ecosystem with secure, real time data, supporting sustainable and inclusive financial systems globally.
The integration enhances data accuracy for DeFi, RWA, and other dApps, enabling trusted transactions for global projects.
Developers can explore Quex’s documentation to unlock next-level secure data capabilities.
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🔔 Active Investment Opportunities:
XProtocol: Entertainment Focused DePIN + Phone | SAFE + Token Warrant | Phone Launch Imminent | Backed by Sequoia, Dragonfly Capital, and Coinfund
XProtocol’s XForge, is the world’s first node-operated blockchain smartphone, allowing users to contribute resources like bandwidth and computational power in exchange for rewards.
Aims to reduce transaction costs to millionths of a cent and support over 1,000 transactions per second, addressing the demand for economically efficient and scalable blockchain solutions.
1.5 million monthly active users, 10,000 active nodes, and over 3,500 XForge devices sold.
Anticipates significant revenue growth, projecting $10 million by the end of 2025, with a target of selling over 30,000 devices.
Led by Co-founder & CEO Peter Huang, a YCombinator Alum who previously co-founded Gotrade, a TradFi startup known as the Robinhood for Asia. Co-founder & CTO Dmitriy Paunin was the Former CTO at Coins Philippines’ crypto exchange with over 16 million users and the Former VP of Technology at Lazada, a unicorn in Asia.
Webacy: Building the "Norton" for Web3 | Backed by Quantstamp, VaynerFund, and Soma | SAFE + Token Warrant $WBCY
Webacy is redefining blockchain security with its SafetyScore™ APIs and Safety Suite, empowering users and developers to protect assets and assess wallet safety in real time.
Platform secures $2B+ in assets, scans 10M+ wallets monthly, and generates 2M wallet safety notifications/month, with projected $3M ARR by 2025.
Positioned to dominate the $58.86B blockchain security market by 2032, with tools embedded in partners like Etherscan, OKX Explorer, and Revoke.cash.
Operating as a consumer-first, chain-agnostic platform, Webacy outpaces competitors like Blockaid by integrating proactive wallet management and risk monitoring.
Led by CEO Maika Isogawa (Stanford CS, Forbes 30 Under 30, ex-Microsoft cybersecurity) and CTO Vincent Chan, the team combines technical excellence with a focus on Web3 safety innovation.
Seasats: Autonomous Maritime Vehicles for Ocean Monitoring and Defense | Backed by Shield Capital and L3Harris
Seasats is redefining ocean operations with Lightfish, a cost-effective, autonomous surface vehicle trusted by high-profile clients like the U.S. Navy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Revenue projected to grow from $1.7M in 2023 → $4M in 2024 → $12M by EO’25, with a clear path to $30M–$50M annually and upside to surpass $100M/year through DoD contracts
Trusted by customers including Navy Special Warfare, Task Force 59, and NIWC, with multiple deployments in the Middle East
Operating costs at just $1,604/day, significantly undercutting competitors like Saildrone ($5,338/day) and traditional vessels
Against legacy defense and maritime players like Huntington Ingalls Industries ($8B) and innovative upstarts like Saildrone (valued at $1B), Seasats offers substantial upside from our $70M post-money valuation entry price.
Dentity: Consumer-First Digital Identity on Web3 Infrastructure | Backed by Blockchange Ventures and Kleiner Perkins
Dentity is building a secure, consumer-controlled digital identity solution on Web3, using open standards to empower individuals to manage their online credentials independently.
$3M Seed extension financing via SAFE with a $30M post-money valuation cap and token warrant
Backed by top-tier investors: Blockchange Ventures (Solana, Filecoin), Kleiner Perkins (Figma, Snap), Capital Factory, Nural Capital, and AARP
Expanded from 5,000 to 50,000 identity wallets in 2023; targeting 500,000 wallets in 2024, with projections for 5 million wallets and over 60 million verified attributes and attestations by 2025
Led by experienced founder: CEO Jeffrey Schwartz, who has founded, led, and been a director at over a dozen public and private companies, including Autobytel, Autoweb, and CarParts.com. He also serves as ambassador chairman of the Decentralized Identity Foundation
Dentity’s infrastructure is already being used by 100+ enterprises, creating a consumer-controlled identity ecosystem that fosters trust and data security across digital platforms.
Travelswap: Exclusive Expedia Crypto Partner Disrupting Travel
TravelSwap, an Expedia exclusive, combines travel booking with 100+ crypto payments, tokenized reservations, and rewards.
Impressive traction since July 2023 launch: 1,000+ bookings, 50+ B2B partners, 10k+ users (50% MoM growth), 12%+ repeat bookings.
2024 plans: $TRAVL token, last-minute DEX, V2 B2B platform, expanded offerings.
SatRepublic: Leading Ordinals Studio Launches tool for collectors and developers
SatRepublic, the Ordinals Studio behind Pizza Artifacts, SatScribe is launching Runevo, a mobile-first infrastructure designed to enable users to transact, monitor, trade, and snipe Runes, Rare Stats, and Ordinals.
Pizza Artifacts, the first historical collection of Ordinals fully inscribed on the exotic 'pizza' Sats from the pizza transaction of May 22, 2010, trading at 25x mint; SatScribe, the first public platform for inscribing on rare and exotic Sats, which has done over 150k paid inscriptions for users; and Runevo, a collection of 6.025 pre-rune Ordinals that sold out in under 24 hours to raise $1.4mm USD, or 17.4 BTC.
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🥳 Upcoming Events:
We will be attending ETH Denver Feb23 - March 2nd! We will also be hosting a special Demo Day for Denarii portcos! More details to come shortly!
Events are a great way to stay informed in our industry, so and we had a very full 2024. We would love to hear about any other conferences you will be attending in 2025, so please let us know as we are still planning our event calendar!
Stay tuned for updates on future events, and until then, keep spreading joy and positivity in our community!
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🤝 We are also looking for part-time syndicate vertical leads in the following categories - if you are interested please reach out and we can discuss the opportunity in greater detail:
Biotech
Space
Robotics & Automation
Climate
Fintech & SaaS
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Onwards 🚀
Drew, Elana, Austin, Joshua, and Lauren