Aaron McDonald — Centrality

Formed two years ago, Centrality is now one of the world’s leading blockchain venture studios. It is supporting the development of a marketplace which allows developers to build and scale decentralised applications using cutting-edge blockchain technology. Based in Auckland, Centrality employs over 100 people in Auckland, London, Melbourne, Tokyo, Germany and Singapore.

Future growth has been crowdfunded using digital tokens. Despite the newness of this funding model, Centrality’s US$80m January initial coin offer (ICO) sold out in just six minutes.

Centrality plans to nurture a peer-topeer marketplace so that instead of tech behemoths like Amazon and Facebook reaping all the rewards, more businesses and consumers can share in the value which is created.

The highly complex transactions are made possible because of blockchain, which can be used to record and share any digital data and is a more secure way of exchanging information.

Centrality is leveraging blockchain to introduce a concept called decentralisation, which helps companies with no prior relationship to work effortlessly together and integrate their applications.

In addition to its ICO funding, Centrality has more than 20 “venture investments” in its portfolio which, says McDonald (above right), have raised an additional US$100m and employ a further 150 people.