The ExitEvent team reported live from the Cryptolina Bitcoin Expo in downtown Raleigh, August 16-17. See updates below and read our preview of the event here.
Pitches from six local cryptocurrency startups:
An N.C. State computer and electrical engineering senior is raising $150,000 to grow GreenCoin, a new cryptocurrency built around carbon reduction and renewable energy creation. Founder Lorenzo Walz is pretty proud of the fact that he can let you own carbon if you own GreenCoin. Owners of solar arrays or other renewable energy sources earn GreenCoins daily based on the amount renewable energy they create and the amount of carbon they sequester.
Walz envisions GreenCoin as a way to incentivize more people to embrace renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions. And his estimates (based on GreenCoin’s algorithm that assigns GreenCoins based on amounts of carbon sequestered) show that GreenCoin pays producers up to 20 times as much as the government would for that energy. GreenCoins can also be sold via exchanges.
The awarding of GreenCoins will be handled by a GreenCoin Foundation, planned to be governed by a board of directors made up of executives from the renewable energy industry, government entities and nonprofits with interest in the field. Much is contingent on the funds-raise happening now.
To build some buzz around the company, Walz is offering a deal to any Cryptolina attendees who are generating renewable energy – 500,000 GreenCoins out of his own wallet.
Friday, 2:45 p.m.
A local IT consultant at Cisco is behind a fast-growing crypto currency retailer called WeSellCrypto. Greg Cronheim partnered with a Swedish developer to launch a prototype, WeSellDoges, in late April. Their goal was to allow people to buy and sell Dogecoin (a coin established in Portland, Ore. in late 2013 with a goal to reach a broader population than Bitcoin) at first, and eventually any cryptocurrency, instantly and with minimal verification. Because PayPal began allowing cryptocurrency transactions on its platform in March, they decided to use its verification and checkout process. Coins are delivered to a buyer’s wallet within 10 seconds.
They’ve since sold 1.2 billion dogecoins, representing just more than 1 percent of available dogecoins to 3,500 unique customers in 76 countries.
WeSellRedd went live July 23, and has sold more than 240 million Reddcoins in 623 transactions. The vision for WeSellCrypto is to have a drop-down menu where any type of coin can be purchased.
Cronheim also hopes he can help bring crytocurrencies into the mainstream. He’ll soon partner with VoidSpace, the first game to use Dogecoin as in-game currency, to get currency from WeSellDoges into the game.
“Mass adoption is key to success, especially for alt-coins,” he says.
Friday, 2:15 p.m.
Triangle Bitcoin Meetup member Jameson Lopp has a project he hopes will help create a more transparent and secure network of Bitcoin nodes, by providing developers mining on those nodes real-time data about the network.
It’s called the Statoshi Project (a play on the name of Bitcoin’s founder Satoshi Nakamoto), and it launched in March. Lopp was inspired to collect and distribute metrics about the nodes when he found it to be the one aspect of bitcoin not transparent and open. He can measure amount of bandwidth, the number of connected peers and the types of peers connected to, as well as any misbehavior on the network. His goal is to determine the normal state of the network so it’s clear when something abnormal happens. He’ll then automate messaging around those abnormalities.
Lopp borrows lessons from seven years of building and scaling the email marketing software-as-a-service platform at Bronto Software in Durham. He’s helped grow the company from seven to hundreds of servers allowing hundreds of millions of emails to be sent daily. And metrics and automation have been key to pleasing the people who use the technology created by developers.
More details can be found in this article from BitcoinX.
