Infinity Stones knows blockchain.
The Silicon Valley-based company has been providing cloud management services and cyber security solutions to blockchain projects since May of last year. The team boasts technical and business experts with years of experience at tech giants such as Google, Oracle, Apple, Intel and LinkedIn. It just raised USD 2 million in seed funding from DHVC and Plug and Play Ventures to bolster its block-producing capacity in proof-of-stake (PoS) networks.
But technical prowess aside, what the team really brings to the table as an ICON P-Rep candidate is an ability to bridge communities.
“We want to introduce ICON to our community and our community to ICON,” says Sili Zhao, Infinity Stones’s business analyst. “We believe our company can act as a bridge for different communities, not only DApp developers and investors but also blockchain enthusiasts in general.”
“We believe by functioning as this bridge, we can create value not only for our existing community, but for ICON.”
Creating value
Infinity Stones took an interest in ICON from earlier this year. Zhao says, “We believe ICON has great potential in the industry, so we started gathering more information and talking to team members.” They decided to jump into the P-Rep race in April.
The company strongly believes in ICON’s potential to create actual value, both for the blockchain industry and for society as a whole. This is something that has been sorely missing in the blockchain space. Zhao specifically cites ICON’s ambition to link disparate blockchain networks. “If we think about it, before we achieve cross-chain communication, each blockchain is like a small community tucked away in the mountains somewhere,” he says. “We can’t communicate with each other. But if we look back into human history, we really started to grow and accelerate that growth once we started talking to one another, exchanging information. That’s how we started creating value.”
“We believe ICON has this potential to create value for blockchain, for people using the technology.”
Boosting interest, boosting influence
By running for P-Rep, Infinity Stones hopes to bring its technical experience to ICON, technical experience learned running high-requirement nodes for other blockchain networks. The company plans to use a hybrid deployment using cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.
What Infinity Stones is really keen to do, however, is introduce its communities to ICON and ICON to its communities. The company focuses on institutional investors, high net-worth individuals and customers with big communities behind them — the kinds of people who could really help ICON more fully realize itself. By boosting interest in ICON and broadening the network’s influence, Infinity Stones hopes to generate more potential investment. More ICX staked on the network would bring further stability, too.
“I know there are a lot of technical candidates, including DApp developers and developers who can potentially develop their own protocol on top of ICON’s blockchain,” says Zhao. “But our approach to broadening the influence of ICON is to enlarge the community. To bring in more interest, more investment and more stake into the ICON blockchain so we can achieve greater stability in the ecosystem.”
Heightened interest in ICON could bring technical benefits, too. Zhao explains, “We believe in the process of broadcasting this information – ICON’s here, it’s great, it’s creating value, it’s hyper-connecting the world – there’s a very high possibility we can bring in DApp developers as well.”
Promoting adoption
Infinity Stones believes that to achieve mass adoption of blockchain, people need to be able to use the technology without having to understand how it works. Zhao cites the example of the popular ride-sharing application Uber. “When we call Uber, we don’t have to know what’s behind the technology of the app,” he says. “We get a car, we get to where we want to go, it’s convenient.”
Blockchain isn’t there yet. You still need some knowledge of the technology to use it. But perhaps not for much longer. Zhao praises ICON for creating an ecosystem that can connect public and private entities, something that could encourage greater usage down the road. “By achieving some value in the blockchain industry – by letting people see the application value of blockchain technology, of ICON – we can generate more interest in the technology,” he says. “People can see the potential of the technology, of what it can achieve, what it can do. Then we can talk about UR/UX improvement.”
Not in it just for the nodes
Infinity Stones stresses that it’s looking for value, and not the kind measured in currency, be it fiat, crypto or otherwise.
Zhao says, “Our focus isn’t whether it’s a bull or bear market or what the price point is.”
Instead, they are looking for projects that can do something for society at large.
“People who visit our website or our social media channels might easily come away with the impression that we’re just a company interested in running nodes, but the thing I want the community to know is that’s not our sole focus,” says Zhao. “The focus of our company is to find value in the blockchain industry, and to apply our expertise through operating stable and secure nodes on chains to contribute to the stability and success of the chain.”
A NOTE ABOUT THE NAME: Zhao explains that the company’s name metaphorically expresses what the team hopes to do. “Each stone has its own value, it’s powerful,” he says. “We can think of each blockchain as a stone. It’s powerful on its own, but the greatest power is achieved when you combine all those stones together.”
Readers can sleep easy, though.
“We’re the good guys,” reassures Zhao. “Not Thanos.”
Stones are solid and set in the ground, and thus also symbolize another company mission — to provide a solid infrastructure for blockchain. “Infinity Stones has a nice ring to it,” he says. “It captures what we believe and what we can do.”
The company is in the process of shortening the name to “InfStones.”
