Elrond-Based ‘Open Metaverse’ Data Platform Itheum Lands $1.5 Million Seed Round

January 11, 2022 – Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Itheum has secured a $1.5 million seed round from Morningstar Ventures that will also provide further incubation for the Elrond-based Itheum project to ensure appropriate growth from its initial stages so it can reach its full potential.

Itheum is the first project coming out of the Elrond Dubai incubator launched by Morningstar Ventures in October 2021. The incubator is part of a $15 million initiative funded by Morningstar Ventures to bring more developers and projects to the Elrond ecosystem.

Elrond’s unique state-sharding approach can process transactions at unprecedented speeds, paving the way for more complex products and services leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracts.

Utilizing the team and investors’ strong footprint in the Middle East, Itheum sees wide potential in the UAE market as the first step toward establishing the world’s first decentralized multi-chain data brokerage platform with exciting and innovative use cases that span from enterprise-level data sharing to personal data-backed metaverse identity technology.

Mark Paul, founder of Itheum, said,

“Itheum provides a suite of tools that enable high-value data to be bridged from web 2.0 to web 3.0 and then be traded peer-to-peer with no centralized intermediaries. The use of blockchain technology ensures users can take ownership of their data and partake in the web 3.0 and metaverse data economies.”

Danilo, CIO at Morningstar Ventures and investor who led the seed round, said,

“After receiving interest from hundreds of projects over the last three months since our announcement of our Dubai Elrond incubator and deep-diving on a dozen of quality projects, we couldn’t be more excited to reveal Itheum to our community. The Itheum team has taken the complex (and serious) technological challenge of decentralized data ownership and trading and made it ‘sexy and relevant’ by building consumer data products in the NFT, gaming and metaverse domains.”

Following the funding round, Itheum will continue to develop the infrastructure to become the core data platform for the web 3.0 ecosystem and the ‘open metaverse.’ Users will be able to use the data DEX for peer-to-peer data trade, create their own virtual avatar identity that is backed by their personal data, mint personal datasets as NFTs, interact with other data avatars, engage in cross-metaverse data trade and align themselves to data coalition DAOs.

The Itheum core platform currently exists across Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain, with development underway to roll out their primary core implementation to Elrond – paving the way for a multi-chain and interconnected data-driven metaverse.

About Itheum

Itheum is the world’s first decentralized, multi-chain data brokerage platform. It has been in development for the last two years with a focus to unlock data silos that are created and closely guarded by web 2.0 organizations.

Itheum believes in generating new value for the owners of this data. Itheum’s team recognized that data is a highly tradable asset with immense worth for its controllers – and hence, they aim to empower users by helping them regain control of their data in the web 3.0 and metaverse era.

Website | Telegram | Twitter | Discord | Medium

About Morningstar Ventures

Morningstar Ventures is an investment firm focused on digital assets and blockchain technology, investing primarily in early-stage token and equity rounds. The firm has a particularly strong interest in supporting the Elrond ecosystem.

Contact

Anita Tejwani, marketing lead of Itheum