Generalizing meta-transactions to improve Ethereum UX

Groundhog is building tools and solutions to bring the subscription economy to crypto e-commerce, and enable the next generation of companies, projects and creators to easily get paid.

A quick primer on meta-transactions

A key part of our architecture is something called meta-transactions.

Meta-transactions are a form of trust-minimized contract interaction where a third party can be responsible for paying the cost of gas to submit transactions to the blockchain.

Meta-transactions are comprised of parameters and data, along with signature that you generate. You sign the data with your private key to prove you’ve seen and approve the transaction.

A third party can relay this transaction to the blockchain for you, wrapping the meta-transaction in an actual L1 transaction, including paying the gas. The contract being called must be able to understand and support meta-transactions.

Cold start problem eliminated

Someone else pays the gas for you! You eliminate the “cold-start problem” of wanting to interact with a smart contract but not having any ether in your account! Isn’t that great?

So who pays the gas for you in a meta-transaction? The idea is that the Dapp, product, or service you’re interacting with can subsidize your gas partially or completely — shifting the gas burden from the user on to the to incentivized party. Dapps may subsidize gas to smooth onboarding, promote usage, reduce friction, etc.

Here’s how we use meta-transactions as we process recurring payments between a Groundhog wallet and Groundhog merchant wallet through the GroundhogPay payment gateway.

1. You sign a subscription commitment with a web3 provider linked to your Groundhog contract wallet.
2. Groundhog stores this signature as your cryptographic commitment.
3. Then, Groundhog or the merchant triggers a call in the Groundhog Pay API to process your monthly payment.
4. Groundhog sends the meta-transaction data to our relayer, and
5. The relayer creates and submits a Layer 1 transaction, making a call to your on-chain Groundhog contract wallet which, if valid, triggers the actual Layer 1 payment from the consumer to the merchant wallet.

Throughout this entire process, Groundhog users and merchants never deal with gas.

Enter the Gas Station Network

That’s meta-transactions in a nutshell, and how Groundhog leverages them. Now, who actually relays these transactions to the Ethereum blockchain? The product you’re using can operate a relay and do this themselves — this is how Gnosis Safe and Groundhog work, for example. But our relayers are a point of centralization. How can this be improved? What if we had a generalized, decentralized network of transaction relayers so that you didn’t have to rely on just one? Enter the Gas Station Network (GSN) and the GSN Alliance.

The GSN is a decentralized network of relayers that generalizes the process and availability of relaying meta-transactions to the Ethereum blockchain.

Here is a great overview of the GSN from Ramon Recuero’s “GSN: The Ultimate Ethereum Onboarding Solution” announcement post.

GSN is a network of servers — called relayers — that are waiting to execute transactions. Each relayer gets paid for every transaction put on the blockchain. Relayers are incentivized to behave correctly and not cheat.

Best of all, GSN doesn’t require any centralized server or entity to organize it. Your application gets a response with all the available relayers. These relayers are stored on Ethereum inside the RelayHub smart contract. Your app can choose the relayer that is going to execute the transaction based on its reputation. Once you choose a relayer, it immediately replies to you confirming the request. If it doesn’t, you can switch to another relay right away.

The service is open and transparent. Anyone can run a relayer. We welcome everyone to join us and add new relayers to the ecosystem. You can set your own fee and you will be rewarded for every transaction that you submit to the blockchain.

However, if you just want to use GSN, you don’t need to run one. You can just modify your dapp to integrate with the GSN via OpenZeppelin contracts and interact with it via a new Web3 provider. You only to specify under which conditions your dapp pays for the transactions and that’s it.

Thank you to everyone who has been instrumental in bringing the Gas Station Network to life, particularly Yoav Weiss and his team at TabooKey, who originally conceived and built the GSN.

First of all, we want to highlight that GSN is an open-source project. A project created by a collaborative effort from the Ethereum ecosystem and the Metacartel group in particular. TabooKey envisioned the concept behind it and created the initial prototype presented during ETHDenver. Then, OpenZeppelin audited the system and pushed the project until where it is today. Support from Portis, Groundhog, BurnerWallet, and Pillar has been also instrumental in releasing this project.

To learn more about the GSN or use it in your applications, visit the following links:

GSN Website

Github Repo

Open Zeppelin Docs

Join the conversation in the OpenZeppelin forum

For more on Groundhog

Visit the Groundhog website. We also just upgraded our Twitter handle from @GroundhogPay to @Groundhog! Tweet at us there. Happy building!

How Groundhog uses the Gas Station Network was originally published in Groundhog Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’d like to build on the proposals and discussion and add some thoughts.

smt… (so many thoughts)

I have to admit, I do not, on it’s face, love the idea of adding another tax or inflationary mechanic on Ethereum. But, I recognize it could be a reasonable way to fund protocol level work besides “have a bunch of ETH to start with” or “rely on donations from well-funded companies or individuals”.

One part of my brain is saying:

We’ve come so far with the Ethereum protocol and the surrounding ecosystem without a mechanic like this — is it really necessary? Large pools of money created through a common inflationary system that people can vote themselves have shown to create huge problems with special interest groups, decadance, lobbying, earmarking, “money in politics”. This could create major perverse consequences and degrade the entire Ethereum community. Besides, if people want to contribute or create, they should either do it for fun and enjoyment, develop a business model, or find a way to get a company to pay them to do it. Subsidizing projects that can’t sustain themselves is ultimately not sustainable. And moreover, one of the most attractive things about cryptoeconomic systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum are their absolutely or relatively immutable economics.

another part says:

The Ethereum ICO and subsequent market activity was enough to really get the core development engine going — but if we are going to sustain this momentum and build on it over the next decade, we can’t just rely on benevolent billionaires. Besides, we’re creating a completely new frontier of technology — imagine what we could do if 20% of the block reward was devoted towards development of cool new crypto software and infrastructure that benefits users, developers, companies and ultimately everyone on the planet? It’s a new world — there’s no reason we have to do things the old way — let’s imagine a new one. We already pay miners to do the work of securing the network. Why not pay developers to develop it?

What if we do nothing?

If the EF has a runway of, say, 3–10 years, as I’ve read in random places on the internet, maybe that’s all that’s required to take the platform to a stable place or where the development attention on the platform is orders of magnitudes even bigger such that development gets funded by companies that want progress.

“One of the most interesting data points is the decline of contributions from unpaid developers, which has decreased to just 7.7 percent in the period covered in the 2016 report compared to 14.6 percent in the 2012 version. With Linux kernel developers in such high demand, many of these unpaid developers have been hired by companies who employ people to contribute.”

from Who Contributes to the Linux Kernel?

If we DID do something…

However, let’s say the community does determine that a development reward is the right path forward.

In that case, I suggest

• permissionless, competitive DAOs
• with each transaction generator having a “vote” or “ticket” to direct that transaction’s development reward to any DAO/address they wish. Anyone should be able to spin up an eligible DAO and compete for funds.

If funds get sent to only one appointed or elected entity (or foundation or DAO or address) we run the risk of plutocracy/decadence. One entity having a consistent stream of funds to deploy that lasts for the life of Ethereum may not be the best way to achieve the parsimony and accountability needed for the desired outcomes.

DAOs can compete for development funds based on how well they are doing whatever each Ethereum transactor wants them to do. One might be MolochDAO, one might be EF, one might be Gitcoin, etc…

Why this mechanic and not staked ETH?

If we use ETH holders, we risk plutarchy. This may not the worst thing, as ETH holders have the greatest incentive to take the actions that support or increase the value of ETH. But what about holders of other valuable on-chain assets? They are also important in the ecosystem. But how would you value those assets on-chain? Perhaps oracles — but this would be currently unfeasible and messy. Still may not prevent plutarchy.

But maybe “value” shouldn’t be our metric, maybe # of transactions are the best proxy with which to permission voting. One transaction, one vote. Similar to Vitalik’s proposal of 1gwei/gas community norm per transaction, from wallet/client developers. Secure TPS at scale is one of the things we want at the end of the day, right? Kind of makes sense the people and entities generating those transactions on the network and filling those blocks every day have influence in the matter.

Vitalik Non-giver of Ether on Twitter

I propose we consider supporting a community norm that client/wallet devs can/should charge a 1 gwei/gas fee for txs sent through their wallet, we don't try to circumvent such fees, and we support protocol changes to make such fees easier (eg. abstraction enabling multisends)

I think it’s worth seriously considering that Vitalik is suggesting a community norm here, rather than a protocol change.

BUT, let’s say it’s too hard to create critical mass through a voluntary community norm and it’s decided to mandate it instead through an inflationary developer reward as part of the block reward.

Let’s say the project generating the transaction adds an additional parameter representing their software (dapp, exchange, or client). Each transaction earns you the right to direct the corresponding development fee for that transaction. It gets fired off every block.

I think the expectation would be that projects generating transactions would direct the funds, with an optional user override. Users could even demand to have the development funds returned to them for each transaction they originate — I doubt that would end up happening, but it would be new information if, and to what extent it did.

You could do 1 gwei/gas per transaction, or you could do a percent of block reward. 0.5% of block reward would generate about $4.5m/year at current prices. This could be a good place to start to test out the mechanic.

To prevent this being gameable, the per-transaction development reward needs to be less than the gas cost of that transaction.

Whoever is generating the transaction (exchange, wallet, Dapp) should be able to allocate their developer reward. Software may choose allow the user to override. But I think it’s a good place to start to just let projects determine where the money goes. If they want, they can even redeem it for themselves. In this way, nobody is economically compelled to participate in this scheme — they have an opt-out. BUT, it would be easy to create a dashboard to track all of this, everybody can see where projects are directing their development funds, and can encourage them to direct their share to one of the “good DAOs”.

In addition, DAOs can also be funded directly and separately by individual or institutional donators.

Questions I have

• In what ways is this vulnerable to gaming?
• Can votes be bought?
• What effect does this have on public discourse VS other proposals or doing nothing?
• Could competing chains sandbag this process in some way or divert funds?
• Could cartels arise that direct funds to projects unfairly or in an anti-competitive spirit?
• Should funding be primarily for protocol/core development?

Lane Rettig writes on Github:

I will not personally support any plan that raises any new funding, whether through block rewards, donations, or another mechanism, until we’ve come up with a reasonable plan for governing and using those funds, which we feel has at least a reasonable chance of garnering broad community support.

I suggest governance be left to each individual DAO, institution or individual behind each address. This eliminates the messy “one world governance battle royale” kind of thing. Essentially miners would decide whether to do this or not, and then each transactor decides where the money goes.

Thanks to Andrew Redden for being a great sounding board for some of these thoughts last week.

Introducing a suite of tools to power the crypto subscription economy, and change e-commerce forever

Until today, there was a big problem holding back the growth of crypto e-commerce. You couldn’t do recurring and pre-authorized subscription payments. The wallets and the payment gateways just didn’t support it.

Today, on February 2nd, 2019, Groundhog Day, we’re pleased to announce the long-awaited soft-launch of Groundhog, a suite of tools to power the crypto subscription economy.

We’ve been crowing from the rooftops about subscription payments in crypto for the better part of a year now. The subscription economy is huge, and the tools to enable this class of payments for the crypto economy up until now were virtually non-existent.

We discovered the need for this product ourselves and felt this pain point acutely while we were scaling up another product we built that took crypto payments with a monthly subscription model. Our customers had to come back and pay their invoices every month, manually. That wasn’t good for anybody. You don’t have to click a button to pay your Netflix subscription every month. It leads to artificially high churn and a bad customer experience.

Once we realized that a robust payment platform and solution to initiate, manage and process pre-authorized recurring payments in Ethereum and other chains did not exist, we immediately set to work to fix that — and breathe Groundhog into reality.

From building our initial MVP at ETHDenver in 2018, to going through two of the world’s top tech and crypto accelerators, Techstars and ConsenSys Ventures Tachyon, raising a round of venture capital, building an incredible team who are themselves builders, and working with them to develop the alpha version of our platform, we’ve covered an incredible amount of ground.

We’re very proud of Groundhog. And we’re excited to share it with you. But what we’re most excited about is how this will affect the crypto ecosystem. Groundhog is the missing link for what’s next in crypto e-commerce. We’re opening up a fundamental type of transaction and type of revenue stream for the entire ecosystem. Crypto companies can now bootstrap themselves through recurring revenue. Non-crypto companies can accept crypto subscription payments easily and convert to fiat. No banks, no credit card networks required. This is going to change the face of e-commerce forever.

How does it work?

Customers sign up or check out on a merchant web site just like they normally would, and click Pay with Groundhog. They are then prompted to use the Groundhog iOS app, the Groundhog Web app, or another supported crypto wallet like MetaMask to approve the subscription.

For every customer and every merchant, our platform automatically deploys a Groundhog smart wallet that lives on the Ethereum blockchain. They are best-in-class, multi signature, non-custodial contract wallets. Customers can fund their Groundhog wallet from any other crypto wallet, or soon, their bank account.

Groundhog uses the latest technology pattern in Ethereum transactions, called meta-transactions, and periodically trustlessly relays the cryptographic commit signed by the customer to the Ethereum blockchain when the merchant calls the Groundhog API in order to trigger, for example, a monthly payment. If the logic in the customer’s wallet approves the payment, i.e. enough time has passed since the last payment, and the subscription is active and valid, funds are transferred to the merchant wallet. The customer can manage or cancel their subscriptions at any time through the Groundhog app of their choice.

Stablecoins

Stablecoins are a huge part of Groundhog. Stablecoins such as DAI allow merchants to mitigate downside volatility risk, and allow customers to have a predictable subscription price denominated in their local currency.

Currently, merchants can set prices in either ETH or USD. One really cool feature of Groundhog is that for a subscription denominated in USD, customers can pay with DAI, or they can choose to pay with the equivalent amount of ETH instead. Groundhog uses industry-leading oracles to determine the proper amount of ETH to transfer, at the moment the transaction is made —In this case, the amount of ETH paid will change every time the payment is processed (according to the value of ETH/USD) but they will always pay the same “value” in USD!

ERC-1337

Groundhog’s vision is that subscription payments between wallets and payment gateways should be interoperable. We believe that is the best case scenario for the entire crypto ecosystem. So as part of the 1337 Alliance, Groundhog co-developed ERC-1337, the new standard for recurring subscription payments on Ethereum. The result of this groundbreaking work is that any ERC-1337 compatible wallet can initiate subscriptions with any ERC-1337 compatible payment gateway.

Team

My co-founder Andrew and I couldn’t be more proud of our team that made this happen. I want to take a moment to personally thank them for their contributions, commitments of time, energy, great attitudes and late nights that they put in to make this launch a reality.

Our platform is in alpha. There will likely be some hiccups to work out. We don’t expect things will be perfect. But nobody has ever done this before. We really appreciate your feedback on every aspect of the experience in order to make the best possible product we can. Our team is on fire with momentum and just like we’re so impressed with how much ground they’ve covered engineering Groundhog, We’re incredibly excited at how quickly we’ll be iterating the product over the coming weeks and months. This launch is just the beginning. Get involved and let’s change e-commerce forever.

Merchants wanted

Get that recurring revenue feeling! We’re now onboarding merchants. You can visit groundhog.network and click Get Groundhog to get started. You can sign up in 60 seconds. If you have any questions or you’d like to learn more, let us know at hello@groundhog.network, or send us a tweet @GroundhogPay!

Thanks for reading, and Happy Groundhog Day from all of us at Groundhog!

It’s now Groundhog Day all year long. was originally published in Groundhog Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2018 Rewind — from Techstars to Tachyon

55,000 miles, 15 cities, 5 countries, 2 accelerators, $620,000 raised

Personally and professionally, 2018 was one of the greatest and craziest years of my life. I thought it would be nice to look back on the year and share some of the highlights with you, and also to journal it for myself. Let’s go!

📈 We were accepted to Techstars, the world’s top tech accelerator.

Techstars was so transformative for us personally, professionally and as a company. Besides the world-class program and leveling up that the accelerator itself provided, I am so fortunate to have met so many incredible people and made so many of what I know will be life-long friendships.

🛎️ We got to have an amazing day at the Toronto Stock Exchange as a guest of Katipult Technology Corp. as they rang the opening bell.

⛰️ We won 2nd place for our Groundhog MVP at ETHDenver, the world’s biggest in-person blockchain hackathon.

ETHDenver was the launching pad for us to build the MVP for Groundhog and began our journey of pivoting our company to tackle the huge opportunity of powering recurring subscription payment processing in crypto.

🤠 Contributed to Wyoming state legislature passing 3 new blockchain-friendly bills

Scott Burke on LinkedIn: "It was a great honour to attend the Thank You event to Wyoming state legislators last night organized by the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition. So much excitement and transformative activity is in the works here. I truly appreciate all the wonderful people I met last night, and thank the people of the great state of Wyoming for setting an example for the rest of the world. Great article here in Newsweek by Gary Miller on the most recent developments. (with a quote from yours truly!😊) Caitlin Long David Pope Rob Jennings Tyler Lindholm Ryan J. Negri Andrew Redden Matthew Pickup Andrew Trudel Lewis Cohen"

😅 Role-played fundraising in Boulder with David Cohen, co-founder and co-CEO of Techstars.

I learned so much about fundraising this year, and what better way to push myself out of my comfort zone than volunteer to put myself in the hotseat with David Cohen in front of our entire cohort?

🌁 Successfully completed Techstars with Demo Day in San Francisco

The Techstars Anywhere Startup Accelerator Graduates

🛴 Got in an electric scooter accident in San Francisco right after Demo Day, broke my hand, was in a cast for 2 months, recovered, and then…

Move fast and break things… 🛴

💰 Raised over half a million dollars in venture capital from institutional funds and angels from across the United States.

Thank you to all our investors who believe in us and our vision for Groundhog!

🔃 Helped develop the new standard for recurring payments on Ethereum (EIP-1337).

📈 Got accepted into ConsenSys Ventures Tachyon, one of the world’s top crypto accelerators.

Groundhog joins Tachyon, Consensys Ventures’ new accelerator

🙌 Got to spend time with Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys and co-founder of Ethereum, Kavita Gupta, founding managing partner at ConsenSys Ventures and Tim Draper, founding partner at Draper Associates.

Scott Burke on Twitter

Had a great time pitching @GroundhogPay to @TimDraper, @ethereumJoseph, @KavitaGupta19 and the rest of our @ConsenSysVC #Tachyon18 cohort today! https://t.co/AKHaeLOPr9

🎤 Spoke about Groundhog at Stanford.

ConsenSys Ventures on Twitter

We took our Tachyon cohort on the road tonight to Stanford for a joint meetup discussing all things Blockchain with the Distributed Trust Initiative @netherapp @quidliprotocol @GroundhogPay @getnuo @KavitaGupta19 @expede

🔥 Pitched to some of the world’s top venture capital firms.

Chris Mann on Twitter

Amazing event put on by @falconxnetwork bringing exciting blockchain projects and investors together in a great environment

😎 Attended Devcon4 in Prague.

Groundhog at DevCon4

⭐ Built out an extraordinary team for Groundhog.

✅ Built the alpha version of Groundhog!

Groundhog is a suite of tools to power the crypto subscription economy.

Our technology stack is incredible, our product is groundbreaking and disruptive in the truest sense of the word, and I’m so proud of our team and what we’ve built together. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way this year including our employees, investors, advisors, mentors and friends — and a special thanks to my co-founder Andrew Redden! Can’t wait to see what we all do together in 2019!

Groundhog is our suite of tools powering the crypto subscription economy. Read more at groundhog.network.

Devcon is the largest annual gathering of the Ethereum community. If you’re building on Ethereum, you pretty much have to be at Devcon.

We were honoured to attend with BUIDLer tickets, a category of tickets reserved for those who are building the next generation of infrastructure, tools, and Dapps powering the public Ethereum blockchain.

The DAI Happy Hour Boat Party

There were a number of events to hit up before the conference even officially started on Tuesday morning. First up was the Dai Happy Hour on Sunday night. Held on a bar/boat permanently docked on the Vitavo River that runs through Prague, this was an opportunity to connect and reconnect with all our friends and colleagues and purchase an entire menu of drinks with Dai! One drink == 1 Dai!

The place was packed, electric with the excitement of the week to come and the thrill of an entire boatful of people using crypto stablecoins to make real world purchases.

All the Dai that was raised was donated to BEN, Blockchain Education Network, to help engage and educate the public about blockchain.

Scott Burke on Twitter

Thanks to @MakerDAO for hosting the #PragueBlockchainWeek Dai Happy Hour! An entire boatful of people buying drinks with stablecoins! Everything went so smoothly. Shout out to the intrepid bartenders. A thrilling glimpse of the vision we're building towards with @GroundhogPay! https://t.co/cQW6yXZD0Q

The DeFi Prague Summit

We had the opportunity on Monday to attend one of the largest “off-DevCon” events, the DeFi Summit.

Composed of a group of leading-edge companies working together to move the Decentralized Finance movement forward, The #DeFi Summit was an unparalleled opportunity to network with other DeFi’ers, and attend presentations and Q&As with leaders in the space.

Some highlights:

• Maker co-founder Rune Christensen got the crowd buzzing with an announcement about their upcoming development plans for Synthetic Assets — cryptographic assets that are like stablecoins in reverse — they use the stable asset (Dai) to collateralize another asset, which could be anything — a stock, an index, or a commodity. We’re very excited to see how these progress — They could be extremely disruptive to traditional finance.
• Alex Van de Sande gave an excellent presentation on what he’s been working on with Universal Login. Universal Login is a pattern of interactions and architecture that radically improves the onboarding experience and account recovery for Dapp users, completely abstracting away seed phrases and public keys, abstracting away gas through meta transactions and relayers, and “tricking” the user into deploying a proxy ID contract on chain. We’re already using many of these concepts in Groundhog, but we definitely gleaned some great ideas we hadn’t considered, that may soon make their way into the product.

We look forward to doing our part to continue the DeFi revolution. Thanks to Max Bronstein and Brendan Forster from Dharma for letting us in. 😂

MetaCartel

🛠️ Austin Griffith on Twitter

The first IRL gathering of the MetaCartel - Universal Logins, seamless onboarding, l337 subscriptions, all powered by meta transactions! cc @avsa @pet3rpan_ @pedrouid @MPtherealMVP and so many more!!! ❤️🤩❤️🍻🦁

RaveCon0

It was 3am on Halloween Eve in an abandoned factory in Prague. I was waiting in line to use the bathroom stalls, only one of which had a door. Hardstyle techno music was thumping, strobe lights were flashing, smoke machines had turned the air into an ethereal haze, and the person next to me and I were discussing the finer points of meta transactions.

Blockchains, LLC

You could hardly go anywhere in Prague this week without seeing huge, mysterious billboards for something billing itself as Blockchains, LLC. They were on buses, trains, projected on to historic buildings, featuring a defiant young girl and emblazoned with vague slogans like “We’re tired of waiting.”

It became apparent that there was going to be a secret reveal party on Friday night. Andrew and I RSVPd to the Eventbrite, and on Friday, we hopped...

Scott Burke on Twitter

On a fleet of buses with hundreds of the world's top crypto minds going to an undisclosed location for a secret reveal. It's probably a ruse and we're all going to die. Rip me! ✌️ #devcon4

I was skeptical. There was so much hype. I expected at most maybe an announcement for some kind of permissioned Hyperledger or interledger/interchain project.

When the crowd arrived, we were greeted with champagne by an army of waitstaff and led down through a glowing blue tunnel to a spectacular event hall filled with cocktail tables, an open bar, dinner buffet, and a giant multi-depth screen on stage with a 1 hour countdown. The space and event was gorgeous, extremely well produced, and I was fairly sure there was no way the announcement could possibly live up to the hype.

I was wrong. Jeffrey Berns, CEO of Blockchains, LLC, took the stage — along with a hologram — to describe what they’ve been building in stealth for 2 years.

Berns participated in the Ethereum ICO and likely made 9–10 figures in the process. Since then he’s spent $250 million of that to do the following:

• Buy 5 nuclear-proof bunkers worldwide to hold multi-sig private keys for crypto custody, including 3 in the United States
• Buy a bank, aiming to be the most crypto-friendly bank in the world, to solve the challenges of blockchain companies acquiring banking services
• Acquire a plot of land in the Nevada desert, the size of Reno, where they will be building an entire blockchain CITY, running on the public Ethereum chain

This is one of the most ambitious projects crypto has seen to date. They addressed a number of concerns up front and admitted that this will either be the one of the biggest things blockchain has ever seen, or it will crash and burn spectacularly. Either way, we left the event inspired with what this might make possible. We look forward to seeing how this evolves.

Neptune Room (the chill out room)

Tower Party

It seemed fitting that the final event of Devcon, put on by ConsenSys Diligence, Maker, Balanc3, and Women in Blockchain, was a party at the tallest tower in Prague. Invitees took elevators up to the top and enjoyed an open bar and DJ, networking and chatting 93 meters above Prague with a 360 degree view of the city. It was a perfect venue to reflect on the events of the previous week.

Huge thanks to the Ethereum Foundation for putting on a world class event that people will be talking about until Devcon5.

Groundhog at DevCon4 was originally published in Groundhog Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Groundhog team is thrilled to announce that we’ve joined the inaugral cohort of Tachyon, the new accelerator from ConsenSys Ventures.

Tachyon is designed for projects with an idea that will take the blockchain and Ethereum ecosystem to the next level.

Groundhog was a natural fit, with our novel approach to enabling recurring subscription payments via Ethereum via our end-to-end payment platform which includes a consumer wallet (Groundhog Wallet) and merchant gateway (Groundhog Pay).

The San Francisco-based blockchain and Ethereum-focused accelerator program kicked off today with talks and visits from Tim Draper and Joseph Lubin and runs from mid-September to mid-November. It will slingshot early stage blockchain and Ethereum projects from idea to viable MVP. The Tachyon program gives participants the opportunity to learn from and to be mentored by members from within the ConsenSys Mesh (including MetaMask, Truffle, Infura, Ujo, Civil, Trustology, Adhara, Token Foundry, Labs, and Legal), pioneers in the blockchain technology space, and advisors from the web 2.0 and web 3.0 worlds. Founders have a chance to pitch venture capitalists and angel investors at Demo Day at the close of the program.

Read more on TechCrunch: ConsenSys details the first cohort of companies to enter its new accelerator, Tachyon

And on the ConsenSys blog: Kicking Off ConsenSys’ Tachyon Accelerator Program

Read more about Groundhog at groundhog.network, and sign up for our mailing list below for news and special offers.

Groundhog joins Tachyon, Consensys Ventures’ new accelerator was originally published in Groundhog Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It gives us great pleasure today to announce that Rob Paone, whom you may also know as Crypto Bobby, has joined the Groundhog advisory board. There’s so much goodness in this announcement, we hardly know where to begin!

Rob is one of the most trusted and respected public figures, educators, and influencers in the crypto space, and has amassed a following of over 140,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel and podcast. He has extensive experience in enterprise tech, including at LinkedIn and Oracle.

AirSwap is, of course, the premier decentralized trading network for Ethereum tokens. We’ve been huge fans of AirSwap, and the team behind it, since their inception.

Rob joined AirSwap full-time earlier this year to lead their advisory efforts. Rob and the rest of the AirSwap team have unmatched insight into the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, and we’re really excited for them to be joining us on this next phase of our journey.

Rob Paone joins Groundhog advisory board was originally published in Groundhog Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re very pleased to announce today that Nate Starrett has joined the Groundhog advisory board.

Nate brings his world-class experience in finance, payments, and business development to the team. Nate has held leadership roles developing American Express’s digital payments products, serving as SaaS marketplace MINDBODY’s Vice President of Business Development through its successful IPO, and most recently focuses on building out Stripe’s financial partnerships with banks, networks and financial technology partners. Nate also serves as a partner of LDGR Capital Management, focused on early stage financial technology and distributed ledger investments.

He started his career in mergers and acquisitions and corporate restructuring, and later took on roles in strategy and business development at MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, and SMB SaaS start-up FiveStars.

Nate received his degree from Princeton University where he studied economics and computer science.

Nate Starrett joins Groundhog advisory board was originally published in Groundhog Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today we’re announcing that we’re placing TokenClub, our monthly subscription service for curated, vetted ICO tokens, into dormancy.

Why are you closing TokenClub?

We’re doing this for a couple of reasons.

1. State of the ICO landscape. We started TokenClub in October 2017, in the midst of the ICO boom. What excited us about ICOs was the same thing that excited our customers — democratized access to public sales of utility tokens. The landscape has since shifted — there are far fewer quality token sales and the quality sales that do occur are heavily gated by access and capital. Our model was to provide you with a basket of 8–10 high quality tokens per month — projects that we believed in, that were focused on fundamental blockchain infrastructure, adoption or consumerization, and that were technically sound. That goal is not currently achievable. We refuse to stuff our monthly baskets with low-quality projects just to sell tokens.
2. Focus. We’re putting all our energy and resources behind Groundhog — our crypto payment processing platform focused on enabling recurring payments and the dApp economy.

We’d like to thank all of our customers, and we appreciate your business, support and feedback from the bottom of our hearts. We’re extremely proud to have been able to provide you with some of the highest quality project tokens we’ve seen in the ecosystem to date — including AirSwap, Bloom, Dala, EnjinCoin, ETHLend, Polkadot, RocketPool, Sirin Labs, and Zen Protocol, through what we think was one of the most innovative direct-to-consumer products in crypto to date.

How do I withdraw my tokens?

If you’re a customer, and you still have tokens in the TokenClub Vault, your tokens are safe, and we’re not going anywhere. We’re simply putting TokenClub into dormancy and not putting out new monthly token baskets or taking new subscriptions. Our team and infrastructure remain intact, and withdrawal procedures will be active until everyone has received all their tokens.

To withdraw your tokens

Make sure you’ve added and verified an Ethereum address inside your TokenClub My Account section, and we will automatically deliver your tokens to that address. If any tokens are part of token sales which are not yet distributed or unlocked, you will receive those automatically as well, as soon as they are distributed/unlocked on our side.

If you were a subscriber in October or December 2017, your baskets contain Polkadot or Zen Protocol tokens, which are non-Ethereum genesis tokens and each require a different withdrawal procedure. We will be contacting you separately with instructions for these tokens.

How do I contact you?

We’re available via email at support@tokenclub.co, and you can chat with us in our Telegram group.

Best regards,
The TokenClub Team

What are you working on now?

Introducing Groundhog

TokenClub is a project of BlockCrushr Labs — our award-winning blockchain venture development studio — and we’re not stopping for a minute!

While we were building TokenClub, we encountered a major pain point for both customers and merchants — it’s difficult or impossible to make or accept recurring subscription payments in crypto.

We’re tackling this challenge head-on by building The Groundhog Network — a crypto payment platform for consumers and merchants, focused on enabling recurring payments and the dApp economy.

The Groundhog Network is composed of:

• The Groundhog Wallet, a multi-blockchain crypto wallet, browser, and hub for your decentralized life

• and Groundhog Pay, a payment platform that lets merchants virtually anywhere in the world accept all types of cryptocurrencies including subscription payments over Ethereum.

Find our more about Groundhog by reading our announcement post, Introducing Groundhog.

To keep up with what we’re doing with Groundhog, and to get first-in-line access to any airdrops, betas, token sales or special offers, enter your email address below.

So long, TokenClub was originally published in TokenClub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nathan brings extraordinary experience in product management, B2B subscriptions, SaaS and much more across a variety of verticals. Nathan is currently Product Director at Zuora (recently-IPO’d subscriptions management company), co-founder and manager of the SaaS Syndicate (one of the top syndicates on AngelList, in conjuction with Gil Penchina’s Flight Ventures), and is an advisor and investor in numerous companies. Nathan was also previously Senior Product Manager at Salesforce, holds an MBA and is working with the Groundhog team on the emerging ERC-948 proposed standard to bring recurring payments to Ethereum.

Nathan Creswell joins Groundhog Advisory Board was originally published in Groundhog Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.