SatoshiPay receives R&D Grant for Pendulum

7June 2021

Blue Star Capital plc

("Blue Star" or the "Company")

Blue Star Capital's investee SatoshiPay receives R&D grant from Stellar Development Foundation for Pendulum blockchain

Blue Star Capital plc (AIM: BLU), the investing company with a focus on esports, payments, technology and its applications within media and gaming, notes the announcement  by SatoshiPay, one of its investee companies, this it has received an R&D grant from Stellar Development Foundation.

SatoshiPay is a fintech company supplying payment and money transfer infrastructure based on blockchain technology to digital industries and globally operating SMEs.

In its blog, SatoshiPay advises that the Stellar Foundation grant will be used to kickstart the development of the Pendulum network project and develop a proof-of-concept implementation of Pendulum. After completing the initial proof of concept, it is expected that Pendulum will be further developed into a full-fledged decentralised layer 2 blockchain that will be accessible for everyone.

The Pendulum network is a new second-layer blockchain that connects Stellar to the wider Deconstructed Finance (DeFi) ecosystem by adding smart contract support and bridges to Ethereum and Polkadot.

In order to bring more complex features to the Stellar network without sacrificing the network's efficiency, SatoshiPay is planning to build Pendulum, a suite of open, decentralised protocols on which smart contracts can be developed and executed. The Pendulum chain acts as a second layer on top of Stellar, with additional bridges to two of the most popular smart contract platforms, Ethereum and Polkadot.

The latest news further strengthens SatoshiPay's position as a leading player in Decentralised Finance (DeFi) which has emerged in the past year and is positioned to profoundly disrupt traditional financial services like trading, credit/lending and yield-generating accounts. The industry has grown over twentyfold in 2020 alone, and reached more than USD 60 billion in Total Value Locked in smart contracts as of May 2021.

Blue Star looks forward to following the developments of Pendulum and to better understanding the impact this may have, if any, on Blue Star.

Derek Lew, Blue Star executive chairman, commented:

"The Stellar Foundation grant is yet another positive endorsement for Meinhard and the team at SatoshiPay as they continue to make inroads into this huge market."

Meinhard Benn, CEO SatoshiPay, commented:

"SatoshiPay is entering the protocol space, allowing us to drive forward permissionless innovation and to increase our impact on the blockchain ecosystem. With Pendulum, we aim to bring together the best of two worlds - combining DeFi applications as we know them from Ethereum with Stellar's compliant fiat tokens. It will also be exciting to see liquidity enclosed in Stellar's $9 billion market cap and the $7 trillion foreign exchange market interact with the booming DeFi economy."

Justin Rice, VP of Ecosystem at Stellar Development Foundation says:

"SatoshiPay has a proven track record as a key Stellar network and ecosystem participant, and we couldn't be more excited that they are exploring an opportunity to connect Stellar to the thriving DeFi ecosystem. With its unique tools for compliant connections to traditional banking networks, the Stellar network is well positioned to connect traditional finance with the innovative DeFi space. Pendulum has the potential to build bridges that increase Stellar's interoperability with other networks, which could enable new use cases and help unlock the world's economic potential by making moneymore fluid, markets more open, and people more empowered."

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About Blue Star Capital

Blue Star is an investing company with a focus on new technologies. Blue Star's investments include a 27.7% holding in SatoshiPay, a payments business using blockchain technology; investments in 6 early stage esports companies with shareholdings ranging from 6% to 13.6% and a 0.9% investment in Sthaler, an identity and payments technology business which enables a consumer to identify themselves and pay using just their finger.

About SatoshiPay

SatoshiPay is a fintech company supplying payment and money transfer infrastructure based on blockchain technology to digital industries and globally operating SMEs. Having initially focussed on building a micropayment infrastructure and platform the decision was taken just over a year ago to use the same technology and experience to move into B2B cross border payments service for businesses.

SatoshiPay announced the launch of its B2B payments platform DTransfer in September 2020 to facilitate cross-border payments for businesses by integrating currency exchange into each transaction.

In December 2020, SatoshiPay announced it had signed an agreement with German Bankhaus von der Heydt to become the first user of the bank's fully compliant Euro-backed stablecoin ("EURB") which it is integrating with DTransfer.

This agreement provides SatoshiPay with a stable on and off-ramp for EURB transactions with instant EUR-based bank transfers within the Single Euro Payments Area (which comprises 36 European member-states) allowing users with an easy solution to instantly send and receive euro-based payments.

To date, the Company has invested approximately £1.9 million in SatoshiPay. Based on the value of SatoshiPay's last fund raise, Blue Star's investment is valued at approximately £4.9 million.

About Stellar Foundation

Stellar is an open-source network for currencies and payments, which makes it possible

to easily create, send and trade digital representations of all forms of crypto and fiat currencies. Launched in 2015, the Stellar network now processes over 6 million operations daily and is widely used in the payments space and for asset tokenisation. On the Stellar network, businesses and developers benefit from near-instant settlement  within 5 seconds and transaction fees that are fractions of a cent.