Smart Contracts Startups

Christoph Jentzsch, a theoretical physicist and early Ethereum contributor, co-founded Sloc.it in 2015 to enable decentralized sharing economy through blockchain and IoT integration. After learning hard lessons from the failed DAO project, he pivoted to building software that sits on top of IoT devices (like smart locks and EV charging stations), allowing asset owners to receive payments via smart contracts. The company raised $2M in seed funding in early 2017 and deployed its solution on over 1,000 EV charging stations.

First Blood is a gaming platform built on blockchain that allows amateur gamers to compete against each other for money. The company conducted one of the fastest ICOs in crypto history in September 2016, raising approximately $5 million in under 5 minutes by selling 465,000 ether at $11 per token. The team liquidated 80% of the raised ether (372,250 tokens) immediately to fund operations, converting roughly $4 million into USD for salaries, marketing, and platform development.

Bancor Network is a decentralized protocol built on Ethereum that solves liquidity problems between cryptocurrencies and tokenized assets through automated smart contracts. The project completed the largest ICO at its time, raising $153 million in just 3 hours on June 12, 2017, with over 12,000 token holders participating. The founder, Yael Hartzal, a 20-year veteran of tech entrepreneurship, emphasized the importance of humility and continuous learning while building a new financial ecosystem.

Santamint is building an information layer for cryptocurrency token economies, aiming to be the "Bloomberg of crypto." The team raised $2 million in their ICO (July 2017) and an additional $150,000 in presale, issuing their SAN token with dual revenue models: traditional SaaS subscriptions and crypto-based access via token staking. With 8 full-time employees, they plan to launch paid features within 6 months while currently building out their data infrastructure.