Elrond-powered Itheum Secures $1.5 Million Seed Round to Build Multi-Chain Data Brokerage Platform

Itheum, the world’s first decentralized, multi-chain data brokerage platform built on Elrond (EGLD) today announced it had secured a $1.5 million seed round from Morningstar Ventures. 

Itheum Raises $1.5 Million in Seed Round

In an announcement made today, Elrond-based multi-chain data brokerage platform Itheum stated it had raised $1.5 million from Morningstar Ventures in its seed round. 

Notably, the funds raised from the $1.5 million seed round will be used toward providing further incubation for the first project to come out of the Elrond Dubai Incubator. 

For the uninitiated, the Elrond Dubai Incubator was launched by Morningstar Ventures in October 2021 and is part of a $15 million initiative funded by the firm to attract more developers and projects to the booming Elrond ecosystem.

Elrond is a leading decentralized, high-throughput, secure, and eco-friendly smart contract platform that offers a scalable and conducive environment to the more complex and sophisticated projects in the digital assets and blockchain space.

Itheum Eyeing the Middle East Market

Itheum will tap its team and investors’ strong footprint in the Middle East market to expand its business in the region. 

Itheum is eyeing the UAE as the first step towards establishing the world’s first decentralized multi-chain data brokerage platform that enables projects to benefit from its innovative and robust use-cases ranging from enterprise-level data sharing to personal data backed Metaverse identity technology.

Commenting on the development, Mark Paul, Founder of Itheum, said:

“Itheum provides a suite of tools that enable high-value data to be bridged from web2 to Web3 and then be traded peer-to-peer with no centralised intermediaries. The use of blockchain technology ensures users can take ownership of their data and partake in the Web3 and Metaverse data economies.”

Similar sentiments were echoed by Danilo, CIO at Morningstar Ventures investor who led the seed round. Danilo noted:

“After receiving interest from 100s 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.”

Itheum to Become the Core Data Platform for Web3

Per the announcement, Itheum will continue to build the infrastructure to establish itself as the leading core data platform for the emerging Web3 ecosystem and the “Open Metaverse.”

Interestingly, users will be able to use Itheum for P2P data trade, create their own virtual avatar identity backed by their personal data, mint personal datasets as NFTs, seamlessly interact with other data avatars, engage in cross-metaverse data trade, and align themselves to Data Coalition DAOs.

At present, the Itheum core platform is functional across Ethereum, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain while developments are at full-throttle to extend the platform to the Elrond blockchain. Itheum’s launch on the high-performance, scalable smart contract platform Elrond will pave the way for a multi-chain and interconnect data-driven Metaverse.