Blue Star Capital’s investee company SatoshiPay publishes ‘2021 in Review’
Following the crypto boom in 2020, decentralised finance has grown tenfold into a $250 billion industry in 2021, says a new report from SatoshiPay, an investee firm of Blue Star Capital.
SatoshiPay, a payments business which utilises blockchain technology, began working on Pendulum, a project that aims to disrupt the payment industry by connecting fiat to DeFi, after the company saw the ‘massive opportunities’ in DeFi applications for cross-border payments.
It has been developing the blockchain, which aims to establish the missing link between the fiat and the DeFi ecosystems through a smart contract network, since the start of the year.
The company explained that the Pendulum blockchain will allow connecting DeFi to the foreign exchange market, building automated market makers (AMMs) to introduce scalable liquidity pools for fiat currencies, and create yield earning opportunities for fiat token holders.
By October 2021, SatoshiPay completed Pendulum’s testnet prototype that allows developers to start building DeFi applications and presented the demo at Stellar’s Meridian conference.
“We have seen a great success in Pendulum’s private sale that proves the huge demand for connecting traditional payment industry to innovative DeFi applications,” it has told investors.
In total, SatoshiPay has raised $5m for building Pendulum from an oversubscribed private sale round of the upcoming PEN token, with strategic partners from all over the world.
Among the presale participants were coinIX, LD Capital, Duck DAO, 6K Starter, CRT Capital as well as high-profile angel investors like Daniel Masters and Shiyan Koh (Hustle Fund).
With new resources added, Pendulum aims to launch its public testnet and mainnet, introduce sophisticated smart contracts to the Stellar network, and add a set of robust fiat assets on the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem. It said its testnet is currently being built and will launch shortly.
StoshiPay has also recently appointed Alexander Wilke as its new CEO who originally joined SatoshiPay in 2016 as a COO and ‘helped build and shape the company from the ground up.’
In terms of its outlook, a major goal for Pendulum now is to become a Polkadot parachain — a blockchain running on the decentralised node infrastructure of the Polkadot network.
The major advantages of launching as a parachain are a strong engaged community of developers and a secure decentralised network from day one, the company explained.
SatoshiPay explained that in order to achieve this, the company will launch Pendulum on Kusama, the pre-production environment for Polkadot, and win a Polkadot parachain auction.
It added that new exciting corridors are coming in 2022 for DTransfer, and that it will be able to send payments worldwide from Europe, UK, North America, New Zealand and Australia.
You can read SatoshiPay’s 2021 year review report in full here.