How we identified the world’s 10 founding blockchain experts for a leading venture capital firm

The venture capital firm turned to NewtonX to identify and custom recruit experts in a historically hard-to-reach field.

The Challenge

A leading venture capital firm was considering investing in a cryptocurrency company, operating on an emerging blockchain. The VC firm needed insights as to the viability of the underlying technological infrastructure and potential for market adoption with leading financial institutions. They needed someone with intimate knowledge of how this cryptocurrency exchange was structured, what kind of security mechanisms it had in place, and its vision and barriers for market integration—knowledge that only crypto project creators and founding members have.

The venture capital firm’s internal researchers struggled to find the insights they needed, so they turned to NewtonX for their technology & financial services market research.

NewtonX Delivery

NewtonX used the Knowledge Graph—our proprietary search engine—to identify the highest-level blockchain experts in the world, both inside and outside of our existing database of 1.1 billion professionals. We were able to identify and custom recruit 10 people in the world with a deep understanding of cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology that enables it, enabling our client to handpick their respondent from the world’s leading experts. 

The client chose to speak with the founding member of one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in use today. We arranged an in-depth, 1:1 consultation for the professional to provide insights on the technical underpinnings of the currency. They also spoke about educating blockchain developers working across crypto financial services companies, institutional investors, enterprise and gaming companies adopting crypto, NFT platforms, and web3 entities like community DAOs. 

Ultimately, the client uncovered valuable insights to make a more confident investment decision. They were able to complement knowledge on technical workings from the founder perspective with the journey that existing financial institutions and enterprise organizations go through to consider trading cryptocurrencies and onboarding crypto platforms. 

NewtonX is an invaluable resource for our growth-oriented projects when we require specialist expertise. Their ability to introduce individuals with industry-specific technology and functional knowledge for input into our market assessments is excellent.

The Solution

This expert had not worked with NewtonX previously, but was impressed by how accurately the NewtonX identification engine had matched him to the client’s needs. The client was likewise impressed, and utilized the expert’s knowledge to pivot their approach to the investment opportunity. 

Our client and the expert now work together, and utilize NewtonX for ongoing B2B research requests. The expert worked as an advisor to the venture capital firm after being connected with them, and eventually became a C-level executive.