Mastercard alliance a big boost for blockchain analytics start-up bitsCrunch

CHENNAI: Germany-based bitsCrunch, which has an office in Chennai, is an emerging NFT- focused blockchain analytics company. It is now collaborating with Mastercard for payment gateway integration, said its founder Vijay Pravin Maharajan.

Backed by marquee investors such as Polygon and Coinbase, the B2B entity had raised a seed round of $7,50,000 from Covalent, Double Peak, GenBlock Capital, Ledger Prime, MEXC Global and Synaps last year.

“The Mastercard association is an accomplishment for us,” says Vijay, as he explains the rationale of using their product to safeguard the data of the financial services behemoth. Through the association, bitsCrunch is aiming to provide secure solutions that will spur NFT investments as he anticipates the token adoption to pick up rapidly.

The company’s core services include facilitating the adoption of NFTs by enhancing their liquidity; providing a transparent NFT marketplace to enhance the credibility of an asset. It also specialises in building models to estimate the true value of assets and creating customised market reports and competitor analysis to help projects understand customers or marketing opportunities in a better manner.

While the operations team in Germany has five employees, India has a 20-member strong team. The company seeks to be a frontrunner in blockchain technology in Tamil Nadu.

“There are about five to ten companies in TN. When India wakes up to the new technology, we would like to be a part of the ecosystem,” says the data scientist, who would like to pay it forward.

Initially, Vijay, an electrical engineer by profession had been following the crypto tokens landscape as an investor, incurring losses and occasional victories.

After stints in VW and Siemens, he drew inspiration from the famed Metakovan Vignesh Sundaresan, who co-founded BitAcces and set up 100 Bitcoin ATMs in 18 countries.

“That was a defining moment for me, and I started putting the pieces together, trying to explore the NFT landscape. During the pandemic, I took the decision to start bitsCrunch. Since scammers were recklessly exploiting the market, we found that security was a major problem. Our ability to crunch data behind NFT was an advantage as the stored data on blockchain technology is not destroyable,” says Vijay, who is a leading data scientist and a TedX speaker too.

Having successfully closed $50 million in the last round, the start-up established in 2020, is now looking to double up when it goes for the next round of funding. As per the entrepreneur, bitsCrunch is also working on launching a native token in Q3.