mintBlue, an exciting new BSV-based start-up offering businesses out of the box blockchain infrastructure, has officially launched as the latest enterprise-focused venture offering companies an accessible way to build powerful and scalable applications on the BSV blockchain.

mintBlue was recently re-branded from Kyrt, which began as a project created for the 3rd BSV Hackathon in 2020. Kyrt earned third place at the event and quickly garnered interest from investors and prospective clients. The initial vision for the project was to create pre-packaged API services, tailored SDKs and ready-made infrastructure that allows businesses and developers to build applications on the BSV blockchain without needing to interact directly with Bitcoin Script and opcodes.

CEO Niels van den Bergh explained that with their re-branding to mintBlue and a recent commercial partnership with a major client that services a large consortium of companies, the start-up has broadened its focus from enthusiasts and SMEs to include enterprise clients. It has also built on its initial offering of microtransaction-based API services to include everything from digital certificates to non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Van den Bergh explains that the aim of mintBlue is to offer companies an easy way to build blockchain-based services while ensuring scalability, reliability and efficiency. These features are supported up by the philosophy and design of the BSV blockchain, which is the blockchain most aligned with the original Bitcoin protocol as described by Satoshi Nakamoto in his original 2008 white paper. This means that BSV is capable of unbounded scaling as well as complex smart contract processing, with its underlying protocol guaranteed to remain stable – giving businesses and users alike the confidence to engage in the knowledge that their applications will remain functional.

‘There are barriers for larger organisations to do something with blockchain, like how to integrate all their existing systems with the blockchain, how to go about privacy and security on that higher level, plus, hiring blockchain talent is really hard,’ van den Bergh says.

‘In blockchain, corporates just can’t get anything off the ground this way. So, we thought with mintBlue, we could become a service provider to integrate payments easily and using common programming languages. We have these packaged standardised API services that organisations can just plug into their systems with common programming languages, so their current developer team can simply build with blockchain.’

A blockchain infrastructure provider for business

In the early days of online payments, companies did not build their own payment infrastructure specific to their platforms. Instead, they used services like Stripe, which ensure interoperability and efficiency. The same is true for companies that are currently looking to build blockchain-based applications and mintBlue aims to act as the infrastructure provider for their blockchain operations, allowing clients to focus exclusively on the development of their platforms without worrying about building services from scratch on BSV.

To this end, mintBlue is constantly adapting and expanding its API packages to cater to the needs of its clients. The company has developed services that cater to many different use cases required by enterprises building on the blockchain and it continues to build out its offering based on client requirements.

‘We are creating a common programming language layer over the blockchain,’ van den Bergh says.

‘Micropayments are one of the services that we offer, but we also do data integrity, digital certificates and we are working on NFTs and tokens which you can just create by sending an API call to our infrastructure.’

‘From a technical perspective, we are doing everything non-custodial. We do offer custodial services, but most of our products now are all locally encrypting and pushing data through our API on the blockchain, so we don’t even see what’s in the data that the client pushes,’ he adds.

BSV as a platform of trust

When van den Bergh first encountered blockchain technology, it was during the peak of the first major cryptocurrency investment rush in 2017. At the time, he worked at an innovation agency that hosted start-up accelerator programmes and sought out new and exciting business ideas that used cutting-edge technologies.

‘I was working for an innovation agency that was hosting and developing start-up accelerator programmes – those are like two-month pressure cookers for entrepreneurs to kind of validate their early assumptions about their business, kind of like a school. It was 2017, and there were a couple of clients in our agency who were looking at blockchain technology. So, then I started to investigate the whole blockchain space, to go through it and get a clear idea of all the different protocols,’ he says.

Van den Bergh explored many different options for blockchain applications but, like many other developers and businesses researching the technology at the time, he found that most platforms were unscalable and inefficient at best, and dangerously unreliable or fraudulent at worst.

When he discovered BSV and investigated the merits of its underlying protocol, however, he knew that it would be the only really viable platform for building applications at the scale he envisioned.

‘I found BSV through that, and that was the first protocol that actually made sense. The idea that you build on something that you know will be there tomorrow is important. Also, in terms of stability, it is something you can trust to build a business upon – I wouldn’t trust any other blockchain because your whole business could change tomorrow if their underlying protocol changes.’

‘If BSV is the original blockchain and it has no boundaries, why consider anything else?’

One hackathon project and the signing of a major enterprise client later, and the idea of facilitating the creation of trusted and reliable blockchain-based applications has begun to bear fruit.

Impressive organic growth

When mintBlue re-branded from Kyrt, it opted to shift its focus from retail and enthusiast clients to B2B and enterprise – a move which has rewarded it with major interest from investors and high-profile clients. The company’s funding round is set to close in Q4 2021, and it continues to grow impressively as a result of this expansion of its business goals.

‘The biggest evolution was the shift in focus from retail and enthusiasts to B2B and enterprise, and the fact that we have closed a large enterprise client gave us a lot of momentum to start conversations with other large companies as well. So, we already see an escalation of this first large client into more larger clients,’ van den Bergh says.

The re-branding was led by a prominent design agency in the Netherlands, which has also done branding for the Dutch government and the Amsterdam municipality, where mintBlue is based. The company has also attracted eminent talent from within the BSV ecosystem, with expert blockchain developer and Chronos Labs founder Aaron Russell being signed on to work with the company.

The signing of a large enterprise client and ensuing adoption of their API packages has led to a steady increase in organic growth – a rare phenomenon in the world of blockchain-based services.

‘If you look at the analytics on the blockchain, you can see how we’re pushing our data on the blockchain. We are actually showing organic growth and organic usage thanks to the adoption of our services by the large consortium of clients using our platform,’ van den Bergh notes.

He says mintBlue aims to continue this growth going forward by expanding its client base and providing value to customers by offering value through interoperable payment and data processing services on the blockchain. Thanks to the design of BSV, there is no limit to the growth rate of the new blockchain infrastructure provider, and mintBlue’s clients can rest assured that their data will be stored immutably and securely within a verifiable digital ledger underpinned by a stable and reliable blockchain protocol.