This week, NFT Lately had a chance to sit down with Tristen Larsen, the CEO of Blockem, a chrome extension that makes it easier to avoid getting hacked when making Web3 transactions.
So, first of all, can you give us a high-level overview of what Blockem is?
Blockem’s mission is to bring a billion people into web3 by solving the massive crypto scam problem. We have put together a team of incredible people in more than 7 countries on a mission to make Web3 a better place. Blockem solves 90% of scams on the Ethereum network and eventually will solve scams on other blockchains.
Airlius Inc, the company that Blockem is under has the vision of enabling every human to have ownership in the digital world. In order to achieve that we must work for 20 years on:
- Eliminating scams.
- Improving user experience
- Creating more use cases to bring more people into Web3.
We’re currently raising our seed round and have received a few investments from Angels Investors.
What inspired you to start building Blockem?
While we were growing our NFT project 1-2 people were scammed every day. Disgusted by this, we took our 8 years of blockchain experience and 5 years of AI experience to solve this. We believe Web3 will empower billions of people around the world and counter the increase in authoritarians. 52% of countries are authoritarian countries, the citizens in these countries need Web3 for a better life and we want to help create that for them.
Who would get the most value from using Blockem?
People who mint NFTs often use Blockem to check the trust score of projects multiple times per day. People are new to the NFT space and are less skilled at detecting scams. People who don’t want to have to worry about getting scammed need a tool to protect them without effort.
Those who pay for services with Ethereum and need to audit wallets with Blockem to avoid getting scammed. As an example, someone impersonating a Youtuber stole $7000 from me in a fake influencer marketing campaign.
With Blockem I could have seen they were scammers.
What would you say have been the most important factors in Blockem’s growth so far?
Partnerships with other projects in the space and then sharing Blockem with their community to keep them safe. Constantly learning, experimenting, and overall obsessing about our mission.
We work 12-hour days 7 days a week on building our companies. We’re a bit insane. We brainstorm, debate, research, talk to great people, collect feedback and keep pushing hard and faster each week.
When and why did you first get involved in Web3?
We believe it can create a better life for billions of people. 52% of the world lives in an authoritarian country and Web3 has the possibility to give these people new freedoms.
A large amount of the problems in Web2 we care about can be solved in Web3. It’s very fulfilling to build a company that also pioneers the future of the internet solving problems that fire you up.
What exciting things do you have in the pipeline?
We are working on allowing users to create their own profile on Blockem, a contract analyzer that deep dives into smart contracts and gives you deep information and integrates into more blockchains.
Where can readers learn more about you and Blockem?
Get our free extension on Blockem.io and follow the progress on Twitter at Blockem_eth.
We try to post valuable content, news, security tips, and occasionally product updates. We just recently launched a tool that automatically highlights all ERC-20 wallet addresses on your screen and by hovering your mouse you can get their trust score.
