Nearly a decade ago, an ambitious group of business and community leaders in Tampa Bay got together to focus on making the beachy Florida city a hub for blockchain technology.
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Today, the city’s blockchain presence is flourishing and not only attracting companies, but venture investors as well.
Rosa Shores and Gabe Higgins, co-founders of BlockSpaces, a blockchain integration platform, are leading the movement.
“Gabe and I have been in blockchain technology since 2012,” Shores told Crunchbase News. “It started out as a fascination, when blockchain was only Bitcoin.”
Blockchain technology is essentially digital information that is stored in a public database and often used to send a transaction, such as digital currency, from one place to another in a democratized way — without any identifying information, leading to improved security.
Shores and Higgins started setting up regular meetings for the blockchain community across Tampa to discuss blockchain development and cryptocurrency. It grew to include businesspeople, and then into building companies and finding investors, she said.
In 2017, they opened their physical BlockSpaces space as a place for all of those people to come together and work on projects. BlockSpaces, the technology, connects existing business applications to blockchain networks through an API-based B2B integration platform.
Businesses began using the BlockSpaces space as a place to work on…
