Today we’d like to introduce you to David Zhu.
David, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up between Chile and LA and started off as a sponsored teenage gamer, which was when I first learned the value of digital assets by selling currency on Final Fantasy 11 and Ragnarok Online. In 2017, I started playing professional online poker, playing 30 games simultaneously on my laptop on Pokerstars and building a visual data layer usable while playing, based on past hand histories of me and my opponents.
From there I founded Enplug.com, the first open SmartTV platform for business, and Urbanflat.com, a network of boutique apartment hotels in California. These entrepreneurial experiences and following the crypto market brought me to found Arcana, the digital asset security startup I am currently working on.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Entrepreneurship is all about trial and error, creating hypotheses and tests to prove or disapprove them. There were many pivots along the way before we found what works. For example, we burned through our 1$MM seed funding building a TV billboard ad network that was placed in retail locations before realizing that we can add value to each retail location by providing the retail business with enterprise SmartTV software without ads.
Arcana – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Arcana started in January 2018 as we saw the rise of ICOs and crypto market in general. We wanted to build on the infrastructure level for the blockchain enabled digital asset wave, so we decided to focus on security for each of the major blockchains.
We initially sought out to build a retail facing multicurrency wallet, reducing the occurrences of human negligence when managing crypto for the average person. As we built our Arcana vault and wallet, the market continuously fell, and the demand for a retail multicurrency wallet fell with it.
At that point, we decided to take all the security infrastructure that we built and pivot to providing an enterprise-grade custodial solution for crypto marketplaces. Every crypto marketplace requires custodial infrastructure to secure the assets that are traded in their markets, and it is costly and redundant for each marketplace to build their own custody solution and maintain it.
We are now providing digital asset security as infrastructure and have a white-labeled wallet attached to it to allow new marketplaces to launch with ease.
Pricing:
- We provide digital asset custody as an infrastructure starting at 25k for Bitcoin.
Contact Info:
- Website: arcana.io
- Phone: 909-282-0202
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @secr23
- Twitter: @secr23
Image Credit:
Vanessa Viavant
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
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