History of BlockApps and STRATO
The history of BlockApps and STRATO is deeply intertwined with the history of the Ethereum project:
- Kieren joined the Ethereum project individually in March 2014.
- Jim started building the Ethereum Haskell client in September 2014.
- STRATO was being used in the ConsenSys hackathon in June 2015.
- The Haskell client was one of six mainnet compatible clients at the Frontier launch in July 2015.
- STRATO was announced at DEVCON1 as the first Blockchain-as-a-Service offering in November 2015.
- BlockApps spun out of Consensys in 2016, just prior to DEVCON2
- BlockApps were founding members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance in February 2017.
- BlockApps worked on various enterprise blockchain projects for the following seven years.
- BlockApps were nearly a decade ahead of the game on the current Ethereum for Institutions push.
The Mercata Marketplace project was announced in November 2023 as a marketplace for RWAs on-chain, including carbon credits, precious metals, whiskey, art, sneakers, clothing, cards, figurines and NFTs. Over time that marketplace application came to be called STRATO Mercata, on top of the STRATO Platform (the application platform built around the original Haskell client way back in 2015).
We launched STRATO Mercata V2 in October 2025, which was pretty much an entirely new product, with new focus on basic DeFi with crypto, stables and tokenized precious metals.
Some people (including the author) have found the two-word naming to be confusing. Is it STRATO Mercato? STRATA Mercata?
So we're going back to our roots. We're STRATO, plain and simple, as we were back in 2015!
Perhaps we can even revive some of the classic merch?
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