Accelerace invests in Aioray, a Web3 e-commerce platform
Accelerace invests in Aioray, a Web3 e-commerce platform for tokengated commerce. Its platform allows you to connect physical and digital items on the blockchain, create limitless tokengated experiences, authenticate ownership of products, and sell them in your store.
Web3: Building the future of e-commerce
Web3, a new version of the web built on blockchains, is likely to be the next iteration of the internet. It will seamlessly combine our digital and physical lives through, for example, immersion, real-time interactivity, interoperability across platforms and devices, and will bridge our digital and physical identity through tokengated experiences.
Aioray is building a simple bridge between the physical and digital shopping experience on Web3. In the words of Aioray’s co-founder and CEO Mathias Heide; Web3 e-commerce and tokengating is unclaimed and unmonetized territory, much like search pre-Google.
As it has not yet reached the masses, there are problems to be solved before Web3 e-commerce and tokengating becomes a seamless experience — both for companies, creators, and customers. The process of buying and selling a physical item connected to Web3 is not automated, it is a pain to authenticate ownership and authenticity of physical products, and there is a lack of interoperable solutions across marketplaces.
By developing an end-to-end integrated Web3 e-commerce platform, Aioray solves all the above pain points:
“Our platform allows you to connect physical and digital items to the blockchain, authenticate ownership of products, connect a store, and create limitless tokengated experiences. It solves the entire group of tokengated commerce-related problems with one platform, it’s simple and intuitive to use, NFTs can give access to any physical item, and our integrations with marketplaces create interoperability”.
Mathias Heide, Co-founder and CEO at Aioray
NFT sneakers pivoted into a tokengated commerce platform
You can say that an unexpected demand and an ambition to learn everything there is to know about the underlying technologies on Web3 is what created Aioray. Mathias Heide started making NFT sneakers in collaboration with artists from Europe, Japan, and China, and one pair of sneakers made a difference.
During a collaboration with a Japanese artist, the Aioray team built their own tokengated commerce tools for the purpose of offering the owners of the NFT sneakers a unique user experience to also receive a physical T-shirt. One customer happened to be a senior executive at a world-renowned digital art marketplace. He loved the user experience and saw a market problem being solved with the tools that Aioray created. This was the kick-off for a strategic pivot, where the founders Mathias Heide and Jens Finnerup re-allocated all resources into expanding the tokengating e-commerce tools, which led them to build the B2B Web3 e-commerce platform that is Aioray today:
“Aioray is built on a foundation of co-creation. We believe the best products in the world are created together with the people who use it. Our mission is to improve Web3 ecommerce for everyone, and we’re excited to continue our journey with Accelerace.”
Mathias Heide, Co-founder and CEO at Aioray
The rest is, as you say, just the beginning.