The 23-year-old founder turning Australias corporates to blockchain
Categories: US BLOCKCHAIN
As the head of Australia’s largest blockchain consulting and development company, Labrys founder Lachlan Feeney hates talking about Bitcoin.“It really has nothing to do with what we do,” the 23-year-old founder says. “I’ve been quite vocally frustrated with the events that have occurred in the crypto industry over the past few weeks.”“The sell-off on the back of the Terra collapse – it paints a very bad picture,” he says pointing to the huge decline in the value of popular algorithmic ‘stablecoin’ Terra, which helped fuel a sharp fall in the price of many cryptocurrencies. Lachlan Feeney, founder and CEO of Brisbane-based blockchain consultant Labrys, says he hates talking about Bitcoin.When your clients are some of Australia’s largest corporates, Feeney’s conToday Labrys’ clients include $3.8 billion ASX-listed integrated services company Downer, the Solomon Islands Government, and a bevy of high-profile Web3 businesses such as NEM and Aurox. Labrys offers these clients services such as NFT development, smart contract writing, and blockchain integration. But while Labrys’ offerings seem like a simple pitch, in reality, Feeney says working with more traditional corporate clients can be difficult because “they don’t know what they want done”. This challenge, he says, is due to an inherent mismatch between the way traditional businesses operate and the way blockchain-based services operate.“Blockchain’s value proposition comes from the ability to decentralise information to remove middlemen, to allow parties to cooperate more easily and directly with one another,” he says. Feeney believes with enough similar collaborations between big companies and blockchain players, we could start to see major blockchain integration within corporates in the next two to three years through the use of more simplified, ‘plug and play’ blockchain services.“We’ve got to start to build a middle ground, and that’s when the corporates will start running in,” he says. In the last year, Brisbane-headquartered Labrys booked year-on-year revenue growth of 180 per cent and has increased its headcount fivefold. The company is entirely self-funded and has never taken on venture capital, with its founder saying that very few people –let alone VCs – really understand the bigger picture and the potential for blockchain tech in the future.Even Feeney admits that he’s still “guessing a bit” as he goes, but says he’s committed to using this emerging technology to help shape the industry for the better. And despite his frustration over the tumultuous state of crypto markets, he’s not fazed.“Ultimately, these events don’t change anything for the long-term trajectory of this industry,” he says.