Unbounded Capital Summit NYC 2023: Creating learning environment on the value of scalable blockchains

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

September 21, 2023, marked the second annual Unbounded Capital Summit in New York City at Dream Downtown, bringing together founders and investors in the scalable blockchain space. The event was designed to be heavy on networking and Q&A, broken up with presentations and panels to stimulate productive discussions between the two parties.

Unbounded Capital Managing Partner Zach Resnick played a huge part in bringing the right investors into the room and connecting them with the founders of companies that make up the Unbounded Capital portfolio.

“As many of you here know, Unbounded Capital is investing in technical founders building seed stage companies in fintech and gaming that are leveraging scalable blockchain to solve some of the world’s biggest problems,” Resnick said during his opening speech.

In an interview with CoinGeek later in the day, Resnick confirmed the purpose of the Unbounded Capital Summits is to create a learning environment with investors on the value of scalable blockchains.

“We’re really catering to the investor audience, whether these are fellow venture capitalists or the types of folks that have too much money to focus on just venture capital, so they invest in venture capital funds and, of course, lots of founders here as well,” Resnick revealed.

The event’s keynote speaker, CoinGeek Chief Bitcoin Historian and GorillaPool Co-Founder Kurt Wuckert Jr., delivered a fantastic speech on the history of blockchain and the current landscape.

“Teranode is out in 2024. We’re talking huge benchmark numbers. So it’s really time to bring in those customers on a timeline where, hey, guys, over the next six, nine, and 12 months, we need your business, and we are ready to go regardless of scale. And that was the little nugget that I inserted into my history of Bitcoin presentation,” Wuckert told CoinGeek.

One of the investors in attendance, Mike Sigal, venture partner of GPO Fund, has over 35 years of experience in fintech, and said when he looks at blockchain, he’s looking at the technology and what happens to the financial services world when you replace a lot of the legacy technology.

“Blockchain is an interesting technology, an interesting tool to change the business models, or at least the processing models, of some of financial services. And that’s kind of cool,” he said.

“As someone who’s been involved in payments, the idea that any infrastructure can move money around the world at 1/1000 of the cost of what Swift or Visa or FedWire or whatever can move, that opens a lot of really, really interesting things. And that’s what gets me excited,” Segal added.

Garrett Krause, both an investor and a founder in the BSV blockchain space, delivered a presentation on Troy Money, an application enabling consumers to own and transact in physical gold, other precious metals, and fiat stablecoins using the Tokenized protocol.

After diving into his own research and speaking with seasoned professionals in the blockchain space, Krause is convinced Tokenized, a tokenization solution utilizing the BSV blockchain, is a platform he wants to invest in via WorldVest, and together they will build out the TroyMoney vision.

“I think that WorldVest jumped into BSV because of everything that we’ve heard here up on stage, because of all the power and opportunity,” Krause told CoinGeek after his presentation.

“And here’s what I’ve deducted. BTC is a HODLed investment case for good or bad, but you can run a whole economy on BSV, and people in this room are building stuff for the economy, and that’s where builders are going to be in the future,” he said.

As Resnick mentioned during his opening speech, Unbounded Capital’s portfolio includes a number of gaming companies as blockchain technology, especially the micropayments a blockchain like BSV enables, provides them with a competitive advantage against the rest of the industry.

“Over half of our clients have been gaming companies, and we realized that there was a pattern that they were trying to create this new kind of new game economies with digital payments items and all that. And we just said, ‘Hey, what if we just focus on games?'” explained HandCash’s CEO Alex Agut, also a speaker and Unbounded Capital portfolio company.

One of HandCash’s gaming clients is Champions TCG, a card trading game that has sparked a huge amount of interest within the BSV community and far beyond. Champions TCG CEO and Founder Miles Malec revealed how working with HandCash for payments and being a part of the BSV ecosystem gives them a competitive advantage.

“With trading card games specifically, by us not having to print the cards, distribute them, send them all over the world, we’re able to put them on chain for thousandths of pennies and stuff. It allows a small team like ours of just four or five people to compete with some of these giants in the space like Blizzard and Wizards of the Coast,” he said.

Nicholas Ryan-Schreiber, CEO of Aym, took the stage in the afternoon and advised investors who want to invest in Bitcoin (BSV) companies to stop spending hours and hours researching companies and to buy Bitcoin instead.

“The Unbounded guys and I were chatting, and they thought that we would bring a different perspective, and they wanted some different ideas in here to try to capture a lot of the sections of the Bitcoin network because there’s lots of different little pockets of thought in the Bitcoin network,” Ryan-Schreiber pointed out.

Toward the end of the day, Joe DePinto, co-founder of Haste Arcade, delivered a presentation on the products Haste has recently launched and explained why these products are only possible using scalable blockchain technology. He also made a point to mention the importance of community and working together within the BSV blockchain ecosystem despite differences in opinions.

“It’s not just about the technology, it’s about the community, and there is community here. We just need to, I think, be better at showing that as opposed to just talking about our technology,” he said.

“There’s real people here. There’s people that I enjoy hanging out with, it’s just fun being in this environment. We’re really excited with everything that’s going on, hearing these presentations of new stuff going on and it’s cool. It’s what I’m expecting,” DePinto added.

Watch: Unbounded Capital Summit 2022 showcases what’s possible with a scalable blockchain