Blockchain Startup Everipedia Opens European Office in Stockholm

Everipedia, a wiki-based, online encyclopedia built on blockchain technology, has opened its first European office based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Everipedia said on Thursday that the opening of the new office marked “a milestone in Everipedia’s mission to decentralize the global knowledge economy” as it looks to grow European traffic and community, and expand its global footprint. The startup is headquartered in Santa Monica, California.

The announcement comes on the heels of Everipedia’s August network launch, unveiling the company’s new platform using blockchain technology to reward users with IQ tokens for curating and editing article. These tokens, in turn, let users participate and vote on network governance issues.

With a market capitalization of US$100 million, Everipedia claims its IQ token is the number one token on the EOS blockchain by market cap and the largest project on the EOS blockchain.

Originally started in 2015 as a more modern and inclusive alternative to Wikipedia, Everipedia is now building the world’s first open source, peer-to-peer wiki network with an incentive structure and a distributed backend hosted within a blockchain.

This model aims to make feasible a fully-autonomous encyclopedia without the need for advertisements or donations. Additionally, the decentralized nature of how the articles are stored using blockchain technology makes the network un-censorable.

The startup claims its goal is to democratize the traditional encyclopedia model and economically align the incentives of the value creators and value extractors.

Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger joined Everipedia as chief information office in December 2017 to help accelerate the platform’s growth. The startup raised a US$30 million Series A funding round led by Galaxy Digital ​’s EOS.IO Ecosystem Fund in February.

Everipedia claims millions of monthly unique users and over 6 million wiki articles, already surpassing English Wikipedia.

“As our editorship and number of articles grows, so must our corporate presence,” said Everipedia Co-founder and president Sam Kazemian. “We have very aggressive goals we’re trying to meet and to do so we must expand globally.”