SettleMint awarded €1.591 million R&D grant from VLAIO

SettleMint, a Belgian Blockchain technology provider with headquarters in Leuven (Belgian) and offices in Dubai, Riyadh and soon Singapore, today announced it has received a € 1.591 million grant from VLAIO, the Flanders organization for Innovation & Entrepreneurship for further development of its product.

SettleMint received this grant to further develop its core technology, which enables any company to rapidly integrate Blockchain technology into existing applications and legacy back-end systems.

While Blockchain is viewed as an innovative technology, it has largely remained at the level of the so called “proof of concept”. The main cause of this is that the technology has fundamental drawbacks in the areas of transaction throughput, query expressiveness, privacy, etc.

To overcome these, developers working with Blockchain technologies need to have an in-depth knowledge of the Blockchain protocols to find their way in this ecosystem of ad-hoc solutions. It is known that the learning trajectory to become base level competent with one Blockchain technology typically takes up to 18 months, which has led to the demand for this profile being significantly higher than the expertise available in the job market.

The Blockchain technology’s complexity is therefore holding back disruptive innovations and mainstream adoption. Various companies worldwide have seen this as an opportunity to offer solutions on top of the Blockchain ecosystem that abstract the complexity. However, these solutions are often either designed for a specific professional activity or industry vertical (e.g. law, payments, food supply chain, energy transmission) or a specific Blockchain technology. This limited expressiveness causes a barrier for further disruptive Innovations and widespread adoption of the technology.

SettleMint saw these drawbacks and steep learning curve to become “Blockchain proficient” as opportunities to deploy a variety of alternative and enabling techniques on top of Blockchain networks to solve for these prevalent shortcomings.

SettleMint’s distributed middleware will allow non-Blockchain experts to develop and integrate accountable and intelligible Blockchain-based applications across business domains and without sacrificing expressiveness.

By enabling non-Blockchain experts to become trustworthy Blockchain developers, businesses can focus on their clients’ journey and design disruptive business model innovations for their own business domain(s).

About VLAIO

VLAIO is a government agency charged with implementing the economic, innovation and enterprise policy in Flanders, Belgium. The agency seeks to finance innovative projects of companies, research centres, organizations and individuals through assignments set by the Flemish Government.