Waves Founder Sells Blockchain Startup to an early Investor

The Waves platform team, Vostok founded a startup which has been sold to one of the project’s earliest investors.

According to a report by Russian media outlet Gazeta.ru, Waves platform’s CEO Alexander Ivanov “sold his stake” in the blockchain based data management and smart city oriented project to Mark Garber of the financial consultancy GHP Group who was an early investor in the project.

The Waves platform has been able to develop blockchain solutions through partnering with some of Russia’s largest private and state-owned enterprises, they have also partnered with global firms, for institutional, industrial, and military use.

Vostok which is a data management firm, in particular, aligned with the Russian state-owned conglomerate Rostec in 2018 so as to securely manage data for the firm’s 700 industrial entities. Moreover, Vostok played a key role in the process of road mapping the “digital economy” as part of the “Strategic Development Objectives of the Russian Federation up to 2024,” announced by President Vladimir Putin.

Ivanov told Gazeta that he would like to focus more on the international development of the Waves Platform. The mammoth challenge of building a decentralized Internet for the new generation based on the blockchain (the so-called Web3), which they implement in Waves, require my one hundred per cent concentration, a lot of concentration and hard work.

Garber has plans to integrate Vostok’s digitalization solutions in GHP’s mining, production, and logistics projects.

The same report by Gazeta also reports that Garber owns a stake in the container transporting company Fesco and holds a board member position in another trade logistics company, called TransContainer.

Vostok was founded in 2018. Its”Gorod N” was done in partnership with Nizhny Novgorod region administrators to develop a civic voting and public budgeting solution, which according to reports enables citizens to vote on where tax dollars are spent.

Garber is keen to let the startup’s development team aboard but has decided to elect a new supervisory board. As part of the plans to strike larger international deals, Waves will open a Berlin office.