A Northwest Arkansas-based blockchain technology company has been finding success as a marketplace aggregator for the next generation of the internet, or Web3. Daniel Fritsche and Josh Owen are the co-founders of TradePort.

They’ve worked with cryptocurrencies, or digital currencies, for years. They’ve also worked with non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which exist on a blockchain and cannot be replicated. NFTs can represent digital or real-world items like art and real estate.

Fritsche added that NFTs can represent a restaurant reservation for a high-end restaurant in New York. He said with NFTs, one can own that reservation and trade it as an asset. NFTs also could represent house titles or property deeds.

In 2021, TradePort launched as a blockchain marketplace aggregator that allows users to shop in one place to find the best price for any available asset. Owen noted that with Web3, all inventory on the blockchain is visible, unlike e-commerce stores such as eBay or walmart.com.

“That was kind of our ah-ha moment,” Owen said. “You’re indexing every asset across a bunch of different blockchains … This is powerful because it allows you to see every asset, at the time, just on one blockchain, but we had high confidence we could do this across any blockchain. That’s when we decided to make it a company and raise venture capital.”

TradePort’s revenue is expected to exceed $1 million by the end of this year as it expands to new blockchains. It earns revenue from transactions and has more than 100,000 users. TradePort also has created NFT indexing infrastructure for blockchains and powers digital wallets.

TradePort recently completed the Bounds Accelerator program, which was hosted by Bentonville-based Cartwheel Startup Studio and the University of Arkansas Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. TradePort has nine staff, including three in Northwest Arkansas and teams across the United States and Europe.

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