Russia may be known as a geopolitical hotspot thanks to another A-lister, Vladimir Putin, but it is -- or better yet, can be -- much more than the giant gas station Senator John McCain likes to call her. Russia always was a high tech nation. But most of Russia's tech prowess was pure government largesse that fed the minds of Kremlin-backed physicists. They did manage to blow up an H-bomb, and get a man into space first, but the Russians were never known for putting their science, technology, engineering and math skills to practical, commercial use.

Until the blockchain craze.

As of late last year, 20% of the top 50 blockchain startups by funds raised were Russian. They were either founded solely by Russians or had Russian partners, according to angel investor Elena Masolova. Like many globetrotting Russian techies, Masolova spends a lot of her time in Silicon Valley. She is best known for selling Darberry to Groupon. She has her hands in a bit of everything. She runs a corporate training company called Eduson.TV in the Bay Area, and is an advisor to TokenStars, a cryptocurrency play that lets users sponsor certain athletes.

"The reason is simple why Russia is everywhere on this topic," she tells me over drinks at the Hotel Ukraine in Moscow. "You have lots of engineering talent and lots of cryptography talent in Russia. Plus you have a Russian economy that is not so great, so blockchain and cryptocurrency in general just looks like an enormous opportunity to entrepreneurs there."

The Russian Blockheads

The Russians (including Russian-Americans and expats) building blockchain companies include guys like Aleksander Ivanov, founder of the Waves Platform; Vasiliy Suvorov, a senior executive at Luxoft and one of the founders behind the Crypto Valley Association being built in Switzerland; Alex Fork, CEO of fintech firm Humaniq; Alex Fedoseev, CEO of 1World Online; Siberian-turned-Australian Sergei Sergienko, the CEO of ChronoBank; Igor Barinov, the blockchain priest at POA Network in San Francisco; and Sergei Ponomarev, CEO of SONM, to name a few.

According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities in Russia, there were 50 companies registered as blockchain technology firms at the start of the year. Their values range from zero to one billion rubles. Here’s another: Sergei Chekriy and his partner Yury Mukhin are two Russian entrepreneurs behind I-chain, an open sourced blockchain platform for the $4+ trillion global insurance market. “We aim to build a global platform that will make insurance fairer and more affordable, will allow customers worldwide to get insurance products at least at a 30-40% lower price by using blockchain, AI and big data,” says Mukhin, the company’s CEO.  "New technologies will drastically change the insurance industry."

Author: SBERCOIN.live