From BSV entrepreneur to start-up enabler, Kirsty Barany-Gibson is no stranger to the Bitcoin SV community. Prior to taking on a position at global investment firm Scale Facilitation, she was known to the BSV community as the founder of Clear Sparrow, an online dating app that utilizes Bitcoin SV technology. Today, Kristy heads Access New York, a program by Scale Facilitation, offering start-ups and small-medium enterprises access to New York City resources.
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller catches up with the BSV entrepreneur who passionately shares her thoughts on Blockchain technology, its most promising use cases and how she enables innovative start-ups and SMEs through Access New York.
“We have a very much diversified portfolio. We're looking into companies in biotechnology, healthcare, obviously blockchain, so essentially anything that is a high disruptor in established industries,” she says.
As an entrepreneur in the blockchain space, Kristy firmly attests to the countless benefits blockchain technology brings to a business. “You need it, otherwise you are going to be at a massive disadvantage,” she asserts. She points to blockchain’s ability to enhance process efficiencies through transparency while allowing companies to reduce liability and cost.
Thanks to Clear Sparrow, Kirsty speaks from experience. Her platform is unusual among dating apps in that it uses blockchain technology to store users’ information. It verifies a user’s background through checking government records as a precondition to the access of potential partners.
Kirsty is also keen to point out the superior power of BSV’s technology saying “the only blockchain that is able to handle the speed and the volume is BSV”. As head of Access New York, Kirsty is enthusiastic about onboarding companies that utilize blockchain technology. As she explains, “I see the BSV blockchain as a way of future proofing the companies that we invest in” she says.
Kirsty believes that the most successful companies of the future will be those that integrate blockchain technology at an early stage. As for companies planning to integrate blockchain later on, she says it is viable, but more expensive. “If you're able to capture real live data, immutable, you are sitting on a goldmine, that is where the value is, so if you would talk to me and say, well, we can do it today, make a small investment and build it versus well, we'll see in five years, then you're losing five years of these amazing value that you could have been tracking since the beginning,” she explains.
Furthermore, Kirsty alludes to the fact that there is an abundance of talents in the BSV community that can help companies integrate blockchain: “there's a group of amazing developers within the BSV community that have been devoting years to building the building blocks, so they are there - you only have to literally bring them into your business and open a whole new dimension to it.”
Kristy’s background in technology goes back to her childhood years. Her father was in one of the largest information technology distributor companies in South America. Kirsty also worked at a cybersecurity firm in the United States that serviced some of the largest brands in various industries. “I protected the oil industry, central banks. I was never the builder, but I always understood exactly how it worked so I could implement it in a very successful way,” she says.
With a deep appreciation for blockchain technology, Kristy continues her journey, hoping to find more use cases that can truly unlock the value of this technology. As she says, “there's a lot of very profitable business models out there that have never been touched just because there's never been that transparency in