coincodex.com
WiV Technology, a blockchain-based trading platform for unique assets, has collected $1.5 million in a private sale of its community-facing token as it bids to scale its ecosystem dedicated to the wine industry.
The funding round was led by RedCave Ventures, along with Daniel Maegaard, SuperNatural, 1010 Capital, StableNode and Tokenization Ltd. The fresh capital will be used to bootstrap WiV’s blockchain-based platform that aims to turn the outdated financial system for wineries and wine investors on its head.
The startup also plans to make hires in product, sales and business development as it builds a team already containing industry veterans based in London, Oslo and Singapore. WiV's owners, Tommy Jensen and Håkon Harberg, have been in the wine investment and fine wine trades for decades.
The relatively big funding highlights how the blockchain real-world applications are growing in prominence. In WiV’s case, the company’s solution aims to modernize the current financial process for vineyard owners, which is currently disadvantageous.
By establishing this B2B platform, WiV will be the facilitator between vineyards and investors. The latter camp can purchase and hold the NFTs created by vineyards for bottles and cases of fine wine. In the meantime, WiV will help vineyards reduce costs by using a more efficient channel to acquire funding and, therefore, free them up from the laborious process of chasing financing each season.
Tommy Jensen, CEO at WiV, said the project didn’t do the token sale for the money only. Rather, it was angling to raise its profile and boost the number of stakeholders involved into their broader cycle. He also outlined WiV’s ambitious vision to onboard new investors looking to take part in building their ecosystem that brings the world of fine wines to the DeFi space via NFTs.
Jensen continued:
"We are immensely proud to have both RedCave Ventures and Daniel Maegaard as lead investors. RedCave brings a wealth of experience in the crypto space representing a group of very successful tech entrepreneurs that clearly understands and have great beliefs in the Real-World Asset that we represent. Daniels track record speaks for itself, and he brings with him a massive dose of experience in both Blockchain and NFT. Combine this with his great passion for wine, it’s truly a perfect match. Both RedCave and Daniel are long-term investors who see the great value we will bring to the wine industry both with DeFi products and NFTs."
Under the hood, WiV uses blockchain technology to create an Ethereum ERC-721 token with full provenance, trade and storage history for every asset that’s on the platform.
The $WIVA token is the backbone that fuels the WiV entire ecosystem. It also brings practical use cases for partners, yields farmers, and liquidity providers.
With the wine secured in a bonded warehouse and fully tokenized, $WIVA holders can easily trade, sell, transfer and even gain access to DeFi yield opportunities against their tokens at a fraction of cost.
One of the notable participants in the last funding round is RedCave Ventures, a large group of blockchain and NFT veterans with decades of cumulative experience. Commenting on the news, a company spokesperson said:
“WIVA is one of the most innovative projects in the crypto space, bringing liquidity to an asset class that has traditionally struggled with liquidity. RedCave Ventures is always keeping a watchful eye for projects with this level of revolutionary thinking, competent team members, and tokenomics. We look forward to seeing WIVA’s bright future unfold."
Daniel Maegaard - a prominent investor, advisor and NFT collector, added:
“With over 8 years active in the crypto space, I’ve been on the forefront of emerging blockchain trends, such as distributed ledger technology (DLT), Decentralised Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). The intersection of digital and physical is continuing to merge, and I believe WIVA is well positioned to take advantage of this rapidly growing space. As a fellow wine enthusiast, it was an easy decision to back such a strong team and white paper as they look to disrupt the billion dollar wine industry.”