Blade Wallet – More Than a Wallet, a Portal to Web3

(00:03):

Okay, so Blade, our mission vision is to onboard the next billion users. I mean, this has kind of become a cliche, or, you know, a term that a lot of, uh, use cases, a lot of projects use these days, but this is closely aligned to what Hadera from day one, when it was, um, coming to fruition in about 2017, their mission was also to onboard the next billion users through enterprises. Now, I was one of the original members, the early members of Hadera in 2018, early 2018. And I remember going to the largest companies in the world with a pitch deck, a pitch deck that basically sold the dream, that look, Adera has solved the tri, and everybody probably knows what the tri is. It’s basically the scalability, security, and decentralization that in order to, um, in order to improve on one aspect, there has to be a tradeoff.

 

(01:12):

And that was my pitch, that was my pitch to the prospective governing, uh, council members at the time. And it was successful. It was successful because now we know we have 27 council, council members who are governing the Hadera platform, but still there’s a lack of adoption, I would say, um, compared to what we thought would, um, what we thought we would have in five years. Um, so in 2018, Hadera Hash Graph, the platform launched, then we carried on to create some layers to make it easy for enterprises to create use cases. One of the first one was the Hadera Consensus Service Enterprises started using the platform. Um, but still it wasn’t enough to get that sort of Hadera being the layer one that is in the forefront. We’re still maybe top 40, um, uh, market Cap. Not a lot of people knew about Hadera.

 

(02:21):

Then the Hadera Token service was launched, and that was truly when I personally was the most excited about this Hadera, um, platform because, uh, tokenization I think is really the, the aspect that is missing or that was missing from the Hadera platform that I thought would allow the next billion user to be onboarded. But still, it was quite difficult for us to fulfill the promise of Hadera being the platform to onboard the next billion users. And so middle of last year, I left Hadera officially and tried to solve that problem. Tried to identify the reasons that Hadera is not, um, being, not at the moment being able to fulfill its, its true promise. And the way that we intend to fulfill its promise is what we call a Hadera layer two solution. Now, I know some people in the Hadera, uh, uh, uh, ecosystem might not like the, the name layer two, because yes, Hadera doesn’t need a layer two. Um, a lot of the performance is native to the platform, but when I mean layer two, I mean in the sense of usability. In the sense of adoption, how easy is it for an enterprise to first integrate and second launch a use case? And third, provide a seamless onboarding experience for their users. So these are the issues that Blade is trying to solve.

 

(04:03):

I mean, we all know what is holding back Web three. Mass adoption enterprise integrations are very, very difficult. It takes, uh, web three developer experience to be able to integrate. User onboarding is still very clunky. People can lose keys. About 15% of of users lose their keys. The payment solutions are still quite difficult. The regulatory backdrop is complicated. Token design, minting and distribution is quite difficult to do unless you have some developer experience. Then of course, there’s K Y C custody. And finally, customer analytics. If an enterprise was to launch a use case, how do they know if their use case is actually getting the adoption that they want and if they can actually go to market and monetize on it? So what Blade intends to do or is doing today is it has a Blade launchpad, which allows enterprise use cases to launch to literally go to market in hours.

 

(05:06):

It’s essentially a B2B SaaS offering that allows easy onboarding, it allows key management payment solutions, design, minting, distribution of NFTs, K Y C, and custody as a service options and analytics. And we provide a wallet, which is the customer experience of these enterprises. So we call this a b2, b2 c uh, model. Essentially, the way we acquire Blades users is through our enterprise partnerships, and we ultimately monetize the users themselves through, let’s say, peer-to-peer NFT swaps, fiat payments transactions, or some identity solutions. There’s a whole bunch of wallets out there. So I just wanna, you know, provide a, a matrix to show where we are. Uh, up on top is custodial wallets. I mean, a custodial wallet by and large is a centralized solution. You can build very seamless onboarding, of course. Um, we are a non-custodial wallet that is enterprise focus on the left, and we try to provide as close to a web two experience as possible because that’s where we think the next billion users are.

 

(06:25):

Now, I’ve placed some other wallets over here. I have immense respect for hashtag and some of the other wallets out there. Apologies if I’ve placed in the wrong place. But there’s other, um, wallets who are more retail focused, B2C wallets, some others that are custodial and B2B focus. And we place ourselves right here in terms of the integration options. We have a whole bunch of integration options. We have integration options that, um, range from somebody who has absolutely no developer experience and it’s off the shelf, um, integration, we call ’em Blade links. We have a blade console that I’ll show you in a second. Um, we have some other, uh, uh, integrations that require a bit more experience, iOS integration, and also we’re working on a c plus plus integration at the moment. Um, we have a web integration, a wallet connect feature. Uh, wallet Connect is the open source wallet connect.

 

(07:22):

Um, that is the standard, uh, in the Ethereum ecosystem that we’re working on four to six weeks we’ll say, and a full white label solution in the making. Um, let me just skip because, okay. So all of this is actually the things that we’re doing today. Just to give you an idea of the traction, um, that we have today. This is the daily account creation in the Hadera ecosystem, about 3000 a day. Um, this is our daily, uh, account numbers. I’d say about 1500 to 2000 per day. Some days when we have use case launching or some campaigns, we get about 5,000. So I’d say conservatively about 50 to 60% of all of Hadera may net account creations are coming from either blade itself or the blade use cases that are gonna come on board on the top or some of the use cases. We have gaming use cases that are coming online. We have fashion use cases, we have art use cases. These drops are essentially the, um, let’s say, uh, proof of appearance use cases or just simple N F T drops that maybe a community owner wants to do.

 

(08:38):

We’ve had great go-to-market traction. We started in May. Um, we have about 200,000 accounts to date. Um, it’s been quite a journey. We figured out how to get, uh, acquire customers at very, very cheaply, but then we figured out, okay, customers means cheap lifetime value. We then, uh, tried some other marketing, uh, which allowed us to lower our customer acquisition costs further, but still we couldn’t raise the lifetime value of the wallets. Um, and then finally, we’re now at the stage where, um, we’re pretty confident that we’ve reached, uh, um, a place that we can get customers cheaply and have high lifetime values and high average revenue per user. Um, for, for the Blade wallet. Again, uh, user growth in context to other wallets. There’s the Coinbase wallet, there’s the Blue Atomic Wallet, Exodus, and trust. Um, we are the green line. So far, so good.

 

(09:42):

Um, hopefully, uh, in the next three to six months when we have a lot of these use cases coming online, this trajectory is, um, uh, is gonna continue improving. Um, let me just jump to a few of the user journeys. Um, so this is, uh, blade Link, uh, an actual use case that we did. It’s basically a person comes to an event, they scan a QR code, and then they’re dropped in an ft. And what we do is exactly this. We customize the user journey. So in this case, it would be, let’s say a QR code or a link. You go to the QR code, it sends you to either the iOS or Android store. The Blade wallet is downloaded, you set up the wallet, you get redirected back to whatever the landing page might be. And then finally the NFT is dropped. You can view the NFT in your wallet, or we have a web view. This is another blade link that is live today. This is a loyalty card auto redeem, any platform that wants to issue loyalty cards. Essentially there are nontransferable NFTs that we design and Mint on use cases behalf. You go to the link, you install the wallet in the same way

 

(11:17):

Once the wallet is created and automatically a loyalty card is dropped into your wallet, it’s frozen, and basically the wallet, um, the wallet, uh, queries the mirror node to figure out how many transactions that specific account has been doing, uh, and allows that user to be token gate into some specific use cases.

 

(11:49):

Fantastic. I think that would be enough. So this is just blade console. The previous two were, uh, no developer experience. Somebody just needs a link. This one is the console. So enterprises would actually be going to this console and going to market in hours. Um, this is, uh, short demo of let’s say a customer that wants to launch, uh, N F T collection. So you can see it’s intuitive. You need a maybe a little bit of experience in, in sort of understanding the user journey, but you enter your campaign name description, how many users do you anticipate? There’s all this token association and all, all the complexity that Hadera has that we basically abstract out. And you have multiple dashboards that allow you to monitor all the campaigns. So think kind of the Google ad dashboard, um, for let’s say NFTs. Um, and finally this demo we’re quite proud of this would be launching a loyalty and membership program. We’ve had a lot of, uh, companies, uh, large enterprises that have, um, a need to launch very simple loyalty programs. And what we allow them to do is essentially, uh, let me just go and there we go, set up the token, create the token, mint the token, and then drop the token into the wallets that either they choose or the wallets that actually sign up for the, the campaign, um, or whichever way that the use case wants to distribute.

 

(13:41):

So that’s it. I know a whole bunch of information, uh, in this five to 10 minutes, but happy to answer any questions that anybody might have.

 

(13:51):

All right. So Bill and, uh, David, if you have any questions, you’re more than welcome to come up and ask them.

 

(13:56):

Yeah. Hey, Sammy, can you hear me all right?

 

(13:59):

Yeah, I can hear you.

 

(14:01):

Uh, first off, thanks again for taking the time, uh, greatly appreciate it. Um, so it looks like you’re focusing, you’ve got two routes. You’ve got retail adoption and enterprise adoption. I’m curious to know where, in your opinion, where you see the best margins and where you’re gonna be directing your marketing efforts, uh, towards, is it gonna be kind of a 50 50 split retail enterprise, or do you see more opportunity focusing on enterprise with the idea that retail will come with it, or, you know, vice versa? Yeah,

 

(14:28):

Right. So, um, our strategy, our customer, our user acquisition strategy is partnership led. In other words, um, we are focused on getting as many B2B users of the console as possible, and that’s how we get sticky users at cheap customer cost. Now, initially we thought about maybe creating a B2B launchpad and just a SaaS sort of business model charge people sort of a freemium model, as you say. Yeah. But we realized quickly that well, actually it’s gonna be quite difficult for us to be able to scale the B2B SaaS, um, model. So that’s the reason it’s a hybrid. We acquire high quality customers through our partnerships. That’s a loss leader, so to speak. Okay. And the way we’re actually gonna monetize is we’re gonna monetize the B2C users that use the wallet through swapping and, and, uh, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

 

(15:29):

Gotcha. And then just a quick follow up, uh, on the console and, you know, you’d spoken briefly about the Blade Accelerator. Will you be looking to, you know, partner with, uh, kind of startup projects at an early stage, uh, and maybe, you know, help them integrate their project through the Blade Wallet? Is that kind of the, uh, idea with, uh, the accelerator? Yeah.

 

(15:48):

Okay. Yeah. So we have, uh, blade Accelerator. Yeah. So Blade Accelerator is, so we have a, uh, we have a grant program that essentially provides grants for use cases that would, would like to go to market quite easily. In any case, up to 10,000, uh, NFTs are for free, so we subsidize it up to 10,000 anyway. Yeah. And above 10,000, you know, I mean, Hadera is super cheap, so it allows us to basically, you know, $76 for 10,000 NFTs. So up to 10,000, you know, we, we subsidize it above and beyond. We’ll provide grants to users that we think have high lifetime value for the wallet itself, and the grants are up to $15,000. Gotcha.

 

(16:28):

Sammy, thanks again. I really appreciate you taking the time,

 

(16:31):

Bill. Thank you. Uh, I do wanna move on to Andrew, but do you have any quick questions you’d like to bring up?

 

(16:36):

Uh, yeah, real, real quick, Sandy, how, how have you financed the company so far, and are you raising capital now?

 

(16:43):

Um, so I fu uh, support from the HR foundation is one, uh, self-funded. Um, we haven’t raised any outside funding yet. We want to get to a million users. Uh, hopefully that’ll happen in the next three to four months when all the use cases launch. And we’re looking to hopefully start the fundraising early next year, q1.

 

(17:03):

Okay, great. Thanks. Good presentation.