Knotel Acquires 42Floors To Build The Blockchain

KnotelAnd 42Floors On Blockchain 

The saying goes that with another day comes to another blockchain project and as the time sources report Knotel which is an office space rental service in Manhattan acquiring 42Floors a commercial real estate search engine whereas according to the founder Amol Sarva, it gets access to data and technology on over 10 billion square feet of the office space thereby driving liquidity to Knotel’s marketplace as also accelerating its plans for a blockchain platform. 

The Deal Remains To Be Complete

With the Agile HQ platform that Knotel is building, it is a way to rent office space for either a few hours or a few months without thereby getting stuck in a lease as the company has 1 million square feet of space in New York, San Francisco, London, and Berlin raising $100 million in funding. Furthermore, it is claimed that the company has more buildings in New York than WeWork. As Amol Sarve says the 42Floors had built a powerful toll thereafter organizing a dark market which hasn’t changed in hundred years and there is still backroom and bilateral as the rest of the world becomes digital and standardized leading to transactions taking months to close with a dozen of middlemen and no reliable information, as it is possible to buy a house faster than when you can rent a floor partnering together helping give owners and customers as they want the truth.

Enabling the company to bring new properties onto its platform, the reported 42Floors acquisition lets non-blockchain based contracts to move to the blockchain.  

Gravity Earth Is Using The Blockchain To Help Refugees 

With blockchain technology comes considerable interest where it could be used to manage personal data of the so-called self-sovereign ID as to date there have been precious few examples of exactly how it works. This is where Gravity Earth has given insight into the use of blockchain to help refugees gain access to financial services as well as other resources to raise their standards of living. Founded by Johannes Ebert and Paul Langlois-Meurinne, the Nairobi based start-up has developed a platform allowing a person’s digital data to be stored securely on the decentralized platform which is a lot of technical terminologies and comes in practice translating to helping digitize data used by NGOs working at refugee camps with around 80,000 people as in case of GravityEarth, it comes to close to its first deployment at the refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. 

Viewing the rollout of GravityEarth’s solution which is used to track daily attendance at the schools in the camp, as also student’s academic performance, it will be based on biometric data as teachers can upload performance and test data in a web app. Ebert comments on the start-up going forward to work closely with NGOs tracking other data and indicators that can be used to positively impact the lives of the residents in the camp. 

More On Gravity Earth

Ebert further explains that it is an unknown person when considering the people in the camps and so every piece of information is about knowing them as also gaining a lot of value. Therefore, it could be that tracking attendance in school or the basic identity similar to age, several kids in the households, the language spoke, etc. While it is known to be challenging gathering data for the Gravtiy Earth platform allows third parties to provide and validating data on users with these validators incentivized with bonuses such as free mobile airtime and lotteries. As he continues through the community trust is built and identity is validated therefore being able to capture claims being made by for example a village chief is very interesting and how does this person connect in the network? how many people are there validating them? 

The current goal comes to be connecting the platform thereafter to third parties where such as financial services platforms enabling users to gain access to banking, financial services, and more in the future requiring some learning on both sides as the users educated on granting third parties’ access to their data. While explaining that the company isn’t planning to run an ICO Gravity Earth coms to raise undisclosed seed money to date as there were plans to raise VC capital. Ebert further adds that they are not considering an ICO as they don’t issue any tokens and for them, the focus is on the product whereas the front end is because there are so many things to be figured out as how do we drive adoption as also keep the users engaged? 

The Final Thoughts 

Looking to expansion opportunities focussed on Africa, the company according to Ebert states that they consider new projects on the blockchain that are once there as a critical number of users on the platform also they have rich data profiles for the users. Hence what interests them is that they like to move to access financial services for refugees seeing it a way to monetize and prove their business model.