Angels On The Block

We democratize access to funding to everyone. We allow start-ups to raise funds x10 cheaper than traditional methods by transforming equity into NFTs.

Comment 2

Project story:

Inspiration

One of our team members recently went through a raising round for his Startup. In this experience, he discovered the inefficiencies and flaws of the process. First, over 67% of founders from YC come from IVY Leagues, Stanford, and MIT alone. Just imagine what thousands of young entrepreneurs could do with access to funding!

After the joy of finally finding an interested investor comes tedious legal work that takes over 6 months on average. Founders should be focusing on their products during this time instead. Crowdfunding platforms allow large numbers of investors to lead funding rounds, but their high fees, legal cost, and the long time it takes to get the money (over 5 months) make them non-viable solutions.

What it does

Angels on the block is an acronym for angel investors on the blockchain. Our platform transforms equity into NFTs and provides a seamless transference solution via smart contracts. NFTs are used for Startups to build a community of early adopters of the company's equity shareholding and provide investors with exclusive opportunity to invest by leveraging NFTs as equity on the Ethereum blockchain.

For startups: after going to a financial check, they get accepted into our decentralized platform. They can fill a request to raise the amount they are looking for and the equivalent amount in shares (percentage of equity). Each offered share has an equivalent NFT, which can be traded in secondary markets. Unlike other methods, our platform transfers the money to the founders as soon as a transaction is made. This payment schedule adapts better to Startups' steady needs. NFTs help create a symbiosis relationship between users and founders. Users get discounts, access to exclusive events and early access to products, and founders have a community of early adopters that can provide valuable feedback.

For investors: it democratizes the access to invest in Startups. Currently, only high-net-worth individuals/firms can invest in them. However, young and middle age people from all backgrounds seek to invest in startups for the greater good, to support an ideology, or because it is the best for the planet. These people are covered with Angels On The Block. The platform provides an array of verified startups to invest and see the impact of their money.

The Startups equity is sold to an investor via a smart contract. The platform only charges a small fee of $750 per round compared to the over $5,000 and 3-5% commission charged by traditional transactions.

How we built it

Our platform takes the form of a website, which uses smart contracts on Ethereum using Solidity as the programming language to perform the transactions of selling a company stock to an investor. The smart contract takes care of minting the NFT which represents a share of a company, and providing the money to the company selling the share.

The website's frontend was developed using HTML, CSS, Javascript and Web3 SDK to integrate the smart contracts on Ethereum. The backend was developed in Python with Flask framework and deployed on Google cloud run instance using docker, and the database we used was Google firebase realtime database.

+ 17 more
Share this project:

Updates

posted an update —

I am Javier Arevalo, and worked in the backend development of the project. I developed the backend infrastructure that takes care of recording the successful NFT/equity transactions in the database and updating the companies and users information after a equity sell trade (company shows updated shares available to sell, updated amount of money raised, etc; and investor now shows his updated portfolio after latest trade). Developed backend in python and used firebase realtime database as the project's database.

Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.