Nic Meliones, Chief Product Officer of BEN, raised Bitcoin for his 1st startup BitWall in 2013. BitWall was just acquired by Watch Out! And Nic is working on this 2nd startup BEN right now. BEN is building identity protocol and to solve the global problems of fraud and identity theft. 7 years ago, Nic worked at Visa. After leaving Visa, Nic started a company called BitWall, which is "one of the first venture-backed Bitcoin startups." BitWall makes it easy for content creators, newspapers, magazines, and others to accept Bitcoin and other forms of payment as a means of assigning their content. BitWall was acquired by Watch Out! this March. When asked if they sold all the Bitcoins, Nic said they spent all the Bitcoin they raised as means of financing and operations. But "it was good. It worked out nicely for us." "When we raised the money in Bitcoin back then the price had appreciated so much that it essentially gave us a very comfortable seed round to finance it. " Nic's second startup BEN is an identity protocol. "The overall genesis around it is that identity theft and fraud is becoming rampant, it's a global problem. And so our goal is to have a more robust protocol that is able to limit and hopefully prevent identity theft fraud. " Connect with Nic Meliones on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meliones #APIWorld #APIWorld2018 #APIWorld18 -------- Heidi Yu on Social Media: YOUTUBE- http://bit.ly/heidiyu INSTAGRAM- https://www.instagram.com/heidihanyu/ FACEBOOK- https://www.facebook.com/heidi.han.yu TWITTER- https://twitter.com/heidihanyu Support Heidi's startup: http://www.BOOSTO.io Support crypto community: http://www.cryptoinfluence.io