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Web 3 is coming. Slowly but surely. How will crypto networks get Web 2.0 users to use the products? How will they build user retention and product trust?

Today we are doubling down on our activities and launching a Diffusion Program, dedicating $30 million to growing our venture platform over the next 3 years.

Today Outlier Ventures Labs hosted a virtual conversation with two technical leaders of the core components: Toby Simpson, CTO of Fetch.AI, decentralised AI for the machine economy and Ken Ebert, Software Architect and OS Engineer, Sovrin the new standard for digital identity.

In this post, we’ll discuss our Token Utility Canvas which we use in the Discovery Phase to help bridge the gap between incentives and actual network users.

ANVIL, is Outlier Ventures’ latest app in the convergence stack. ANVIL brings trusted agents to Fetch.AI using Sovrin’s verifiable credentials. ANVIL can be used for reliable electric car charging and trustworthy data sharing bots, all working in Fetch.AI’s Open Economic Framework.

we have begun to formalise this organic collaboration via a handful of working groups which are now being opened up to our wider ecosystem through what we are referring to as The Convergence Alliance, kicking off with an initial CTO Working Group for some of the core protocols including: Fetch, Ocean, Sovrin, Haja Networks and several other soon to be announced partnerships.

The Convergence Stack is a further refinement of the Outlier Ventures investment thesis first published in 2016 anticipating the convergence of blockchains with IoT, AI and eventually robotics.

Masayoshi Son, the charismatic leader of Softbank the $100bn venture fund and his 300 year vision of the future has been making headlines but for me it misses a fundamental paradigm shift happening in the Internet today.

The terms off-chain governance and decentralized governance are used too liberally in the crypto space and without a full grounding in political philosophy.

Once you have your problem structured the next step is to turn your attention toward the actual participants of the network and how value flows around the ecosystem. This step should be rooted in user research.

Following the successful September release of our Convergence in Mobility report, we are sharing the findings in events around Europe.

Tokens are value creation and exchange mechanisms that allow network agents to participate in, and/or manage the system. They ensure that nodes operate effectively and actors participate in a coordinated manner. Therefore, they play an important role in aligning the incentives of the ecosystem participants.

Outlier Ventures’ State Of Blockchains 2019 report highlights increasing user adoption whilst data shows decline in ETH price isn’t due to ICO sellers  

As Web 3.0 continues to develop and various projects build out important infrastructure to scale a decentralised web to the masses, many of these protocols can be viewed as public utilities to be used by new emerging market applications.

This article summarises machine learning and its relation to data silos before introducing Outlier Ventures’ first step into apps in the Convergence Ecosystem.

Token design is perhaps the most discussed and exciting aspect of the entire process. A huge database of cryptographic primitives have emerged, and new ones are introduced almost every week.

Today, a world without machine learning is hard to imagine. From voice assistants to the analysis of medical data to self-driving cars, these algorithms power the latest and most advanced technologies. All this is enabled by large amounts of data, provided by individuals and businesses.

The first phase of token creation should start with an understanding of the ecosystem itself. In the Discovery Phase, we propose a process for token teams to formulate and align on the problem they are actually trying to solve. The fundamental question of “Why a token?” seems like a simple one, but getting internal alignment on the answer is harder then it seems. The discovery phase is all about determining and aligning on the particular characteristics of your business model, and defining the requirements for your token design.

Outlier Ventures today published the Q3 report in its State of Blockchains series, which provides an overview into blockchain investment and market trends worldwide. The report reveals a range of insights into the market, three of which are:

With vast amounts of data available to us today, the question of privacy and responsible handling of this data becomes increasingly critical. Not only is data privacy required by law in some cases, e.g., for medical or financial data. Additionally, the desire of customers and clients for discretion and privacy is growing and has become a topic of public focus.

Today, we want to introduce the idea of decentralised data marketplaces and why we believe they are foundational to unlocking new economic value.

The transportation and logistics industries are having an existential crisis. Electric vehicles and lithium battery costs are falling quickly; autonomy software is improving at a rapid pace and ride-sharing platforms are leading customers to question the need to own cars.

Every new technology brings with it new and disruptive business models. And for blockchain technology, these are tokenised ecosystems. Blockchains represent a shift in how value will be created and distributed. For this shift to occur the underlying fundamentals of new emerging business models need to be explored. Tokens are the atomic elements of these new business models, and a powerful mechanism, that when designed correctly, can help drive economic alignment across a network.

Stability is perhaps the one word that defines the last few months. Between regulators seeking to create less hostile environments for startups, a barrage of stability-oriented tokens and enterprises seeking to use blockchains to improve operations, it has become evident that the ecosystem is growing beyond the wild swings of the past year. The price of Bitcoin mostly stayed around $6500 and while concerns around exchanges and Tether have been matters of active discussion, the volatility of tokens for the most have come to a standstill. In fact, towards the end of last month, as legacy financial markets went for a tumble, tokens stayed relatively stable with Bitcoin holding price over $6000.

Hopefully by now, you are familiar with Outlier Ventures and our investments. As a venture platform with finite resources to fulfill intensive advisory work, we have so far chosen to focus on areas we believe to be most impactful and profitable: the intersections of deep technologies like AI, IoT and the Next Gen Data, enabled by tokenized and open source distributed ledger technologies. You will probably know we term this The Convergence Ecosystem. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious to us that so much more is needed to accelerate and strengthen this vision beyond protocols to mainstream and widespread adoption.

Today we launch our new report on the concept and practice of developing effective tokenized crypto-assets. This is driven by our strong belief in the potential power of decentralised systems to provide a new and important evolution in how our economy and society can be organised, but in order to achieve this, effective ecosystems must be created that align the incentives of all the participants in a new model economy.

If you think investing in crypto is hard - investing in our Convergence Thesis, how DLT combines and converges with IoT, Big Data and AI is even harder. The technical complexity of keeping pace with multiple deep technologies and their interactions is hugely demanding and requires a dedicated team of technical analysts who can only really learn by doing. This means they must be active developers, administrators and participants of networks.

This post provides a high-level view of our findings and explains why the convergence framework is a valuable tool to understand the disruption taking place in the transport sector today.   

As we start Q4 of 2018 we review the mixed emotions, torn regulators, excited enterprises and emerging usecases

All You Need To Know About The Impact of the Internet of Things, Blockchains and Artificial Intelligence on the Transportation and Logistics Industries

Women in tech, developing nations, privacy, how governments can tax crypto and more insights from the Paris OECD blockchain forum.

Despite the token bear market, VC, M&A and corporate blockchain projects are thriving

Communications around any form of token sale can be a legal minefield.  Projects need to think about what the token looks like, who they wish to engage with and where they are located before they can figure out what requirements on publicity they need to comply with.

Decentralisation is often cited as the core metric by which all blockchain projects are measured. But what exactly is decentralisation? Is it a starting point or destination? Is it quantifiable or even desirable in every instance? This has become increasingly pressing now the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) has explicitly communicated ‘decentralisation’ as a determining factor in whether it categorises a crypto-asset (aka token) as a security.

This is an idea I’ve been kicking around Outlier Slack whilst on the road and at various panels the last few weeks that I just wanted to get up even in a rough and very crude draft form to kick-off the debate online. Over the coming months the intention is it will be formalised into something more substantial and nuanced by the wonderful folk at Outlier from across both: Token Design + Market Research Departments.

What does artificial intelligence have to do with blockchains? Well it’s actually helpful to remove the buzzwords and talk about a new decentralised data value ecosystem in which data is produced, distributed and consumed. Using that framing, the Internet of Things produces data, blockchains and other authentication technologies distribute it, and then the data needs to be processed, analysed and automated. This is where so-called smart contracts, decentralised compute and decentralised machine learning can be used on data in decentralised databases, document stores and blockchains.

Pillars for a new era of banking for the poor through identity, governance, data protection and open-data. Many early proponents of the Bitcoin network believed Bitcoin would disrupt the financial system in emerging economies. Censorship resistance, low entry barriers, minuscule fees and round the clock access meant a new world of opportunities.

Marketplaces are critical elements of the entire Convergence ecosystem; the element that incentivises data to be collected, shared and utilised. We now have the ability to open up the machine economy and need to think of ‘trading’ beyond the scope of human interaction. The sorts of marketplaces that are being developed in the crypto community are decentralised, automated and tokenized. These marketplaces are made possible because of the distributed ledgers, consensus mechanisms and interoperability protocols at the lower levels.

Recently it seems like everyone from C-suite corporate bankers to the local barber has been an expert on Ripple, Status, and regular old Bitcoin. But so far, distributed ledger technologies have not affected most people’s lives in any meaningful way. We believe one of the missing ingredients is augmented reality.

The aim of this submission is to address why we, as a prominent UK based venture capital firm and advisor to the global blockchain industry, believe it is critical to developing a responsible, balanced and proactive approach to innovations in ‘crypto-assets’, in order to unlock their potential to serve the UK economy and its overall long-term competitiveness.

Clickbait headline aside, if we aren’t careful we are going to end up replicating data silos we hoped blockchains and decentralised technologies would remove. This is why the transport layer of our investment thesis: the Convergence Ecosystem, is so important. For us the transport layer includes but not limited to four components: data interoperability like say Haja Networks; value interoperability like Polkadot, AION, Cosmos and atomic swaps; transport and messaging protocols like telehash and whisper, and state communication protocols like Lightning Network for Bitcoin, Raiden Network for Ethereum and IOTA’s Flash Channels.  

Today, I want to talk about a use case that only blockchain technology can deliver. They are few and far between and usually revolve around applications that demand censorship-resistance. Indeed, a public data commons demands just that.  

To create a stronger bridge between the token economy, and the rest of the global economy, it will be important that the frictions listed in the previous section are addressed. This might be done through the introduction of new infrastructure, better targeting of resources, or even through a hybridisation of centralised and decentralised innovations. We discuss these solutions below.

The new data value ecosystem sees data captured by the Internet of Things, managed by blockchains, automated by artificial intelligence, and all incentivised using crypto-tokens. For a summary of the thesis take a look at the introductory blog, and for a deeper look into Blockchains, Community, & Crypto Governance have a read of my last post here. Today though I want to talk specifically about the convergence of blockchains and the Internet of Things.  

When technological revolutions occur, why do so many projects end up failing? Perhaps our inability to figure out how and where to effectively deploy new technology results in what Greenspan termed ‘irrational exuberance’ back in 1996.

We are excited to introduce the Outlier Ventures vision of the future and our investment thesis: The Convergence Ecosystem. The new data value ecosystem see data captured by the Internet of Things, managed by blockchains, automated by artificial intelligence, and all incentivised using crypto-tokens. For a summary of the thesis take a look at the introductory blog, today I want to take a deeper look at how important communities, governance and politics will play in this new era.

So on 12th Jan (2018) I wrote a post saying there needed to be a ‘Crypto Winter’: a sustained minimum 50% haircut on the market. I actually wanted to say 75% but compromised with the team to not sound too alarmist. Next time I won’t be so restrained ;)

Here we introduce the Outlier Ventures vision of the future and our refined thesis: The Convergence Ecosystem. Download the full paper here.

The main objective in cryptoeconomics is to design token economies that will grow in utility value over the long haul.

The long-term success of token economies and the protocols they are built around is led by fundamentals, and ultimately adoption. How useful is the protocol, to how many end users? This question is fundamental to our vision of the Convergence Economy.

2017 has been one hell of a year for everyone in crypto. However, like all those who have been involved professionally for many years now, on the one hand we feel vindicated (and a little wealthier), on the other hand frustrated.

Through the SEED token sale, Botanic Technologies (a company that boasts clients including Fortune 100s, startups and multiple government agencies) is open-sourcing its otherwise proprietary IP to supercharge an open industry standard for the common good.

Blockchains combined with artificial intelligence is more than just a technical innovation: it’s an economic paradigm shift

It is almost banal to say it, but as a society we have a data problem. Most of the World’s data is held on private servers.

If you have spoken to me recently you will know myself and the Outlier team are really very excited to have announced at the beginning of the month becoming Evernym’s, and the Sovrin Foundation and it’s token’s, lead investor and strategic partner. As with every investment we wanted to find some time to provide the rationale to our decision which I have laid out below.

First, there was Bitcoin. Then there was the altcoin boom. Then the hot new stuff was blockchains without coins. And if you’ve spent any time in the cryptocurrency space lately, you’ll know tokens are the thing of the moment with 10 or more new ones every week.

With every emergent technology comes business innovation that changes how value is captured and delivered.

Outlier Ventures, after 3 months of deep research, is pleased to share with you it’s vision for the next stage of the token economy: The Community Token Economy which can be downloaded for free from our website.

The Imperial College Centre for Cryptocurrency Research & Engineering (IC3RE) at Imperial College London has joined forces with blockchain investment group OutlierVentures.io to undertake a 3-year R&D program focused on the convergence of industrial blockchain with other ‘deep tech’ technologies like IoT, machine learning and autonomous robotics.

Are you also getting the feeling blockchain is a load of bullshit? Are you struggling to see how any of this will ever make any money? Fear not we help you cut through the hype and explain our 'blockchain +' investment thesis.

Dealing with identity of users is both a profound challenge and a promising opportunity for blockchain technology. We first explored identity in early 2015, when we identified 9 building blocks for a successful blockchain industry. So how are things mid-2016?