While many associate blockchain with cryptocurrency, that is not the case with this platform. It does not invest in cryptocurrency, just private credit opportunities and investors do not need to have experience in crypto or blockchain to effectively use the system, the firm said.
“Clients don’t need to know anything about gas fees, or seed phrases or crypto wallets even though it’s still fully onchain,” West said. “For clients, all the complexities of crypto have been abstracted away, thanks to Heron employing the latest technology.”
The two men have more than 10 years of experience in the technology industry, with West most recently serving as a senior engineer at Coinbase, an American publicly traded company that works on the cryptocurrency exchange platform. Sall was previously head of Product Analytics at Coinbase, as well as head of Data Science at Medium, an online publishing firm.
They are optimistic that Heron can open the private credit market to a new group of investors and offer them easy access to it.
“What we really hope to do is we see a whole new wave of more folks wanting to invest in this asset class and they haven’t been able to do that before very easily,” Sall said. “Our goal here is to open up access to this new kind of investor base who are going to really benefit from being able to participate.”
The firm has opened a waiting list for those who are interested in participating. The purpose of the waitlist is to allow people to learn about the product and complete the onboarding process while the firm finalizes the first investments that are available.
The firm anticipates launching those investments in a few weeks.