AWESOME! A great and worthwhile project. Brooklyn software company, ConsenSys, started by a true blockchain guru, Joseph Lubin, is launching a $50M venture fund. The fund will back startups focusing on DLT (distributed ledger technology) that will address challenges like refugee assistance, supply chain tracking, etc. Here is someone putting his "money where his mouth is" to show the potential of how digital transaction architecture can really help the lives of the world's poor. Like I said, AWESOME! (Bill Taylor/CEO)
"Blockchain, meet the 2030 global goals.
ConsenSys, an ambitious Brooklyn software company founded by blockchain guru Joseph Lubin, has launched a $50 million in-house venture capital fund to back startups turning the distributed-ledger technology on global challenges like refugee assistance, distributed energy, and supply-chain tracing.
The firm employs more than 150 former bankers, management consultants, mathematicians, engineers and techies to build and support ventures developing new services and business models built on the blockchain. The new venture fund signals the firm’s intention to demonstrate the potential of the emerging digital transaction architecture to transform the lives of world’s poor.
“I believe resolutely in the 100-year mission of blockchain: to completely change the way society functions through decentralized technologies,” says Kavita Gupta, who was tapped to head the fund. A former World Banker and previously an impact investor at the family foundation of Alphabet’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Gupta told ImpactAlpha, “Blockchain is going to revolutionize the way we do business and use and share data.”
Blockchain already is opening up entire new avenues for social and environmental impact, says Gupta. Think about a Syrian family preparing to flee their home as war approaches. They’d have little time to collect their birth certificates and IDs, property deeds, education credentials and financial accounts. “If you lived in a country that used blockchain from birth, you’d have all of that information accessible and instantly verifiable when needed,” Gupta said.
Gupta says there are blockchain applications for nearly all of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations, which aim to end poverty, guarantee universal education and much more, by 2030. “I’m a huge believer in the SDGs and have worked with the U.N. to boost them,” Gupta told me. “Blockchain is an architecture. It can enable solutions to almost any SDG.”..."
Full Story at Impactalpha