Gifto, a new blockchain ‘virtual gifting’ protocol that will allow millions of content creators to monetize their content on sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, has announced that Pantera and Block Asset have joined a group of initial investors into the company. Gifto is a universal blockchain protocol that is being launched by Uplive, a mobile application with 20 million users that will earn over $100 million in revenue this year alone from its own private virtual gifting protocol.
“Gifto is a unique project to address an existing global pain point for content creators. We see Gifto as the beginning of a new trend coming from Asia, where successful consumer companies can use blockchain to be even more successful, opening up their experiences to benefit the entire world,” said Bo Shen, founder of Fenbushi capital and Block Asset Fund.
“We are excited to be a part of Gifto project and helping them to realize the mission of empowering global content creators with virtual gifts. Gifto team’s vast domain experience, Uplive’s 20 million + user base, and massive revenue are key reasons why we decided to invest. We will be working closely with the team on their global adoption,” said Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital.
Gifto is being launched by Andy Tian, a serial entrepreneur and the former head of Zynga China, who is now the CEO of Asia Innovations Group (AIG), one of the leading mobile entertainment groups in Asia and the creator of Uplive and other popular mobile apps. The company has a total user base of over 100 million users across its apps and is backed by first-tier venture investors such as KPCB and Index Ventures.
“We have already created an incredibly popular application in Uplive that uses virtual gifting to generate significant income for content creators on the application,” said Tian. “Gifto takes this exact model to the blockchain, makes it universal across any content creation platform, and standardizes the gift values with a token, making it accessible across the world with any local currency. Our plan is to roll out our platform and token to 20 million+ users in Q1 of 2018.”
“Partnering with top-notch investors who share in the vision of the company is a key aspect to any successful project and we are absolutely thrilled to have Bo, Paul, and the rest of our early investors behind us as we launch this exciting product over the coming months.”
The Gifto Protocol technology is being developed to be a self-governing and self-sustaining ecosystem for virtual gifts to be created, curated, tracked, bought, sent and exchanged across any content platform such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Virtual gifts will be immutable, universal and independent of any content platform and will be stored as smart contract assets that fans can send to their favorite content creators on any platform, without any plugin or additional technical integration.
Gifto was recently selected recently by Binance, a popular cryptocurrency exchange, to become the first project on Launchpad, a new, exclusive, platform that provides their community with vetted, high-quality projects and provides a safe and secure way for them to purchase tokens.
The company announced details of their initial coin offering earlier this month in front of a packed media forum event at Singapore Fintech Festival discussing ‘How Asia will lead the West in Consumer Blockchain Adoption.’