🠈 Medici Ventures 🠊
Medici Ventures
Medici Ventures is a private equity fund started by Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com. The fund concentrates on emerging blockchain companies.
While creating Overstock.com, Mr. Byrne had many negative encounters with corruption on Wall Street which he detailed in a presentation called Deep Capture. The presentation tells of systemic corruption on Wall Street.
Wall Street uses an antiquated clearinghouse model to process trades. When one buy stock through a broker, the stock does not immediately change hands. What happens is the buyer places a purchase order. The seller places a sell order. The orders goes through a mysterious closed process at the exchange.
This process is corruptible. Mr. Byrne concentrated on a phenomena called a "naked short." A naked short happens when someone sells stock that doesn't exist.
Medici Ventures in making investments in blockchain technology which might create an alternative mechanism to Wall Street to trading securities. Oddly, the company is named after the Medici family which was a corrupt banking family that caused the failure of the Florentine Republic.
I accessed the site in December 2018: This is a list of companies in which Overstock has invested. The size of the investments vary:
- Bitsy, headquartered in Cottonwood Heights, offers a cryptocurrency wallet for mobile phones.
- Bitt is a Barbados based blockchain payment system.
- Based in Boston, Chainstone Labs is a stealth-mode firm developing blockchain and token technologies.
- Based in Austin, Tx, Factom is developing a blockchain-as-service platform.
- FinClusive, based in Washington, DC, is creating a risk and compliance framework for community based partnerships.
- Identity Mind appears to be based in Palo Alto. They are creating products to protect identities while combatting money laudering and fraud.
- Medici Land Governance is a blockchain app designed to improve land governance and property ownership in developing nations.
- Minds is a social-network/publishing platform that rewards users with tokens.
- Netki is developing biometric based digital identification verification systems.
- Based in Silcon Valley, Peernova is developing distributed systems and networking solutions.
- Ripio is a Florida based company creating bitcoin products for emerging markets.
- SettleMint, which shows an address in Leuven, Belgium, is developing distributed blockchain middleware.
- Spera appears to be creating an application and web hosting program.
- Symbiont is creating a system for hosting smart contracts.
- tZero is creating a trading platform for markets.
- Vinx is a blockchain based platform that allows vineyards to trade wine futures.
- Votez.com, which might be based in Boston, is using blockchain technology to creating a voting system.
- Based in Cleveland, Votem is creating a blockchain based voting system.
Directory Listings:
- Salt Lake Sites - Finance: Medici Ventures
- Salt Lake Sites - Agriculture: Medici Ventures