The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A new co-working space for digital entrepreneurs is launching months ahead of schedule at the former Luciano’s restaurant on East Bay Street, its chief executive said yesterday.

Dr Jillian Bethel, Crypto Isle’s principal, told Tribune Business: “We’ve been putting together this project for a while, looking to do things for Bahamians in the blockchain and cryptocurrency and generally tech space. And we are kind of ready to launch a couple months before we thought we would be.”

It is offering “a connect, learn and earn space”, Dr Bethel added. “This is a co-working space that’s built on top of all the problems that we had operating our crypto business prior to this one, and that was with Island Bit. But you know, there’s a lot to do,” she said.

Island Bit was a platform designed to link cryptocurrencies to cryptocurrency ATMs, but the venture never took off the way it was envisioned. Learning from that failure, Dr Bethel added: “There’s a lot in crypto where you have to know how to build businesses. You have to figure out the tech, figure out where to get talent to work on your team, figure out where to get funding.

“And what we’re doing here is building a place that’s a one-stop shop for people to come in, work, find their team, learn about cryptocurrency, build their business and get the funding that their business may need in a longer term.”

This cryptocurrency incubator will deal with such “challenges” head on. “When it comes to the infrastructural tech, there’s a lot that we need here,” Dr Bethel said. “Fortunately, we have a lot of people who are interested in partnering with us to make sure that those things really happen.

“We need to take care of the Internet here. We need to explore these things, and these are the kinds of things that we are testing now before we really, really launch what we need to do.”

Dr Bethel added: “One of the other challenges actually has to do with the demand of the market. We find that a lot of people want to understand crypto, but they want to get in and get rich quick or something like that.

“So this, this place, gets people over the hump of getting out of this ‘get rich quick’, and then really understanding what crypto was....to kind of get rich, right. So that’s what Crypto Isle is.”