India’s no 2 telecom player Airtel announced on Thursday that it has picked up strategic stake in Singapore based blockchain startup Aqilliz. Airtel did not disclose the financial details of the deal. The Sunil Mittal led company has acquired stake in Aqilliz through Airtel Startup accelerator program. Before this deal, the telecom major had picked up stake in quite a few startups through this accelerator program.
To the best of our knowledge, this is for the first time that Airtel has picked up a stake in a blockchain startup.
Aqilliz was founded with the aim of building a decentralized marketplace for the creator economy. A creator economy that help companies engage with their customers and increase brand awareness without compromising on their data privacy.
Aqilliz’s flagship offering is its patented hybrid blockchain platform ‘Atom,’ which help brands in creating consent based content solutions to engage with customers in a secure and rapidly evolving digital economy.
Airtel will be deploying Atom and other Aqilliz’s solutions across its Adtech and other digital entertainment solutions. This includes Airtel ads, Wynk Music and Airtel Xstream.
According to Aqilliz’s official website, it will also seek to build a decentralized marketplace solutions across the metaverse to empower the next generation creator economy. This specific solution is most likely meant for the future considering that metaverse is still in nascent stage.
For all those who don’t know, blockchain technology refers to decentralized electronic and digital database that is spread across distributed ledger. This distributed ledger is nothing but nodes spread across computer network. Blockchain is one of the main underlying technologies that fuels the operation of cryptocurrencies.
While cryptocurrency has been getting lot of bad press over the years, blockchain technology has been openly embraced by companies across the sector.