SettleMint awarded €1.591 million R&D grant from VLAIO

SettleMint, the Belgian Blockchain technology provider with headquarters in Belgian and offices in Dubai, Riyadh and soon Singapore has received a € 1.591 million grant from VLAIO, the Flanders organization for Innovation & Entrepreneurship for further development of its distributed middleware Mint. Together with the recent grant from Horizon 2020 SME Instrument, that brings the total amount of funding to €3.4 million for SettleMint.

SettleMint received the VLAIO grant to further develop its core technology, the distributed middleware ‘Mint’, 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 Mint will allow non-Blockchain experts to develop and integrate accountable and intelligible Blockchain-based applications across business domains and without sacrificing expressiveness.

Matthew Van Niekerk, co-founder & CEO of SettleMint, is extremely pleased with the grant and states, ”SettleMint is thrilled to receive the support of VLAIO to accelerate the further development of our core technology. We have established ourselves as a market leader and with accelerated development; we will ensure that we maintain this position in the years to come. Our engineering team is world-class and growing so if you are eager to work on cutting edge R&D and development with blockchain technologies.”