Jacobo Toll Messia is as intense an entrepreneur as you will find. In a good way.
He is the Founder and CEO of Nahmii.io which is an evolution from an earlier company called Hubii.
If I were the competitive selfish type, I would keep this story buried for a few months while I cook something up with Jacobo and thus elbow out any investor competition but one of my major personal and professional themes from 2021 has been absolute radical transparency so I shall spill all the beans here (and trust I will magically rewarded in a shower of Nahmii tokens one day or some such).
I remember a coffee in Media City Bergen with Jacobo nearly 4 years ago. It was as if I was speaking to somebody who had discovered God. That same glisten in the eye. That same fervor. That same desire to convert me into believing as well.
Except the topic was blockchain, not God.
While I was raising money for Oceanview, Olav Rune, my fund partner, and I took out a one year option to invest in Nahmii in the hopes that we could raise the fund in time to exercise that option. We failed.
And then we went to work setting up a number of meetings with corporates to land pilot projects using blockchain technology. Aquaculture was a big focus.
We ended up feeling like we spent a lot of time educating a lot of people about blockchain for free. Blockchain 101 sessions over and over again, often 2 - 3 hour sessions with people. But we never got a project over the line together.
I then had to try to focus almost exclusively on the fund fundraise and lost touch with Jacobo for a while. Then he read a recent post of mine and sent me an SMS. “We need to talk.”
And so I spent a few hours on Zoom last Friday with Jacobo and his partner in crime, Mark Briscombe, COO. Mark has been actively exploring blockchain early on, since 2011. He really knows his shit.
Nahmii is an infrastructure play. Ethereum, despite its promise, does not offer scale, immediacy or fee predictability today.
Nahmii´s mission is to deliver the most institutionally viable scalability protocol for Ethereum. Nahmii is an Ethereum Layer 2 solution that:
increases throughput
lowers transaction costs
provides instant finality
Layer 1 by the way is the Ethereum Mainnet. Layer 2 (L2) is a term generally used for solutions processing transactions off of the Mainnet.
Nahmii was the first L2 on on Ethereum and has been tested for over 30 months via several POCs, with feedback from 100+ companies and partners.
The hope with Nahmii is that we can now entice corporates into the world of blockchain and build commercially viable products.
The fully diluted market cap of the Nahmii token (NII) is $717,435,207 as of my checking it out on 14th December 2021 on CoinMarketCap.com. And it´s been as high as $2.5B this year. The trading volume over the past 24 hours was $605,866. Over the past 3 months as many as 5500 people have held the token as an asset. I myself will be buying NII after Santa delivers some money to my stocking.
Too Much Noise. Not Enough Signal.
“The ratio of signal vs noise in this industry is abysmal. 99% noise. Very little signal.” says Jacobo in our Zoom chat.
So I am trusting Jacobo and Mark to be my audio engineers, essentially, to help separate the signal from the noise. We need to move away from speculation, scams, currency day trading etc. etc. and into building meaningful products and companies.
Nahmii.io undoubtedly is one of those. They have established their chops as serious, professional and transparent in this space - with infrastructure technology developed over many years that has the potential to build an ecosystem of product builders. They can be one of the main ambassadors for credible institutions to run POCs and projects. And to his credit Jacobo writes regularly in a clear and elegant fashon on his blog as they grow and mature.
Professional investors have taken note too. Not picked up by Norwegian press at all, but Jacobo quietly just landed $8m USD in funding from (very) crypto savvy investors.
Sam Cassatt used to be the chief strategy officer of ConsenSys then left to launch a $50m venture fund, Aligned Capital. (ConsenSys is a leading blockchain technology platform, founded by the cofounder of Ethereum, Joe Lubin). Kavita Gupta has her own new $50m+ fund as well, and she too used to work at ConsenSys, as Head of Ventures.
DARMA Capital is also an investor. Andrew Keys is the lead from their side. He is what you would call a heavyweight in the Ethereum space, a key adviser to Joe Lubin, and he’s on the Board of Directors at ConsenSys.
Nahmii could well be one of the world´s major gateways into translating this esoteric blockchain tech into “seeing and believing” real world applications.
But wait, the nerdiest of you might ask, what about the scaleability improvements Eth 2.0 upgrade is supposed to bring with proof of stake and sharding?
I was about to go down a rabbit hole of tech to try to get my own head around it and explain but I think instead I shall just point you to this video, “Nahmii explained in less than 10 minutes, “ which is both technical and somehow effectively pointed at the layman at the same time. Not an easy balancing act but I think it does a good job. It does though assume you already own a crypto wallet and have done transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.
So as I said, Nahmii is infrastructure. Now we need product.
My intention is to pre seed projects built on Nahmii. Then I want to cherry pick the promising ones and seed new companies.
Jacobo and I have shaken hands on a collaboration in this regard, and he is willing to be a significant anchor investor (he obviously has strong incentive to make the Nahmii ecosystem flourish plus we have now a longstanding rapport over many years so trust one another.)
Side note: It´s a bit confusing for me right now the difference in creating companies as opposed to investing in tokens for a project / product / protocol / company. I am thinking there might be a balance here where if we are to set up a new company or invest in an existing company developing on a blockchain like Ethereum, then perhaps you adopt some sort of 50/50 ish balance in how we invest. So new company requires $500k in equity financing, say, and we provide 250k towards that need + invest up to another 250k in the token associated with the company or project. In theory, should transaction volumes increase, the value of the token increases (plus they are liquid and immediately tradeable) so you could well envision (in a successful scenario), ultimately making the decision to sell your tokens to make an immediate return for your investors while still holding the poker chip of equity in the company for the long run.
Let´s talk outloud a bit regarding things we could build.
In talking to my wife this morning about all of this, we landed on this major paradigm shift (well talked about all over and no invention of ours to be clear) as the one that helped us make the most sense mentally regarding the opportunity of blockchain:
The Removal of the Middleman
What are the implications here? We can start with just 2 possibly profound impacts.
1)
The further empowerment of the creator. More direct revenue for the creator. Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have already opened doors in this regard, especially for digitally-native artists.
The creator economy boomed from the pandemic, estimated to be over $100b this year, primarily from sponsorship dollars.
The above sum does not include what is called “off chain” transactions btw so the sum is considerably more in reality.
So what is a non fungible token? What does non fungible even mean?
In a word, unique. Bitcoin or Ethereum? Fungible. You trade one for another. You get one back. They are the same. Your father´s antique Rolex? Non-fungible. Unique. You cannot find your father´s antique Rolex anywhere else in the world except on your glass cabinet shelf.
An NFT will secure your ownership of a unique asset. Creators no longer need to worry about forgery.
Let me repeat - creators no longer need to worry about forgery.
In a nutshell, an NFT binds a unique physical or digital object to a unique digital token.
I think one obviously space where we are going to see NFTs rapidly evolve from being “overhyped,” as it´s currently accused of to being “legit” if not completely eye-opening is in the world of gaming.
Play to earn, as it´s called. Unique digital items (NFTs) can ideally increase in value over time - and be sold off later for profit.
However, there is some hard to fully understand controversy surrounding gaming and NFTs. I am still frankly very much wrapping my head around this, despite numerous podcast listenings and article reads.
On one hand I read in the BBC
And then on the other hand I hear that Steam quietly banned not just NFTs but the use of blockchain technology altogether.
In the meanwhile …
… I´ve decided to start myself out in this brave new NFT world with Art.
According to Mint, $2.5 billion worth of NFTs—mostly photos and animated gifs—have been bought and sold since the epic sale of Mike Winkelmann´s work above last March (at the venerable Christie´s no less).
For $69 million, as you no doubt have heard or read by now.
I have one artist in mind who is interested in partnering up with me to explore creating and marketing both digital native as well as digital representations of her “real” art. Just to get our feet wet and feel the marketplace mechanics and dynamics for ourselves.
Stay tuned.
2)
Removal of a bank in financial transactions. DeFi.
DeFi stands for decentralized finance, i.e. you no longer need to use a bank or financial institution to move or borrow money.
As one entrepreneur put it to me, can my Mother maybe email me money one day? Yes! “Now just think about the implications” he said.
According to DeFi Pulse, the total locked value of DeFi today stands at nearly $100B.
A key concept fuelling the rapid growth of DeFi is “composability.” Forgive the lengthy quote below but I thought it was worth it. I take this from a blog post on Nahmii´s Medium site.
Composability of products with interchangeable components built by a wider variety of developers results in more growth for the companies and better, more customizable products for end users.
For Blockchain technologies, and especially protocols aiming to be foundations for other applications, composability is table stakes. It is a major part of what fuels the amazing speed of its development and all forms of Web3 applications. The composability of projects built not as monoliths, but engineered to allow for easy integration as interchangeable parts of a larger whole, allows new products to be created by combining the different “lego” blocks of all of these projects instead of starting from scratch on each piece of functionality.
In DeFi in particular, composability is quickly resulting in a new financial ecosystem constructed by connecting different interoperable protocols in a completely permissionless, transparent, and censorship-free way. For example, an application can be built by combining a lending protocol enabling users to take out loans with a staking protocol that takes those loan proceeds and generates interest which another protocol automatically reinvests. Building on pre-existing, composable protocols speeds development and creates new investment opportunities. Decentralised finance is only the beginning.
Jacobo Toll- Messia, CEO, Nahmii.io
Now that was a lot to take in, I know. If nothing else, just think of code as Lego Blocks for now. And you have a communal pile of them on your living room floor and can just use the ones you want to build something. You don´t need to code from scratch.
DeFi protocols, apps, and platforms can work with each other - as needed.
More on «Money Legos» 101 here.
Stopping Here For Now.
I will stop here for now. As I re read this, despite my effort to decode and simplify, I still feel I am not as concrete as I want to be.
And I think therein lies the real opportunity for a creative and an investor like myself as I come to terms with the jargon, a base layer understanding of the technology, the data that is emerging from credible research.
To translate. To build real world product in 2022. I look forward to backing projects on Nahmii.io as a start.