HackerNoon Raises $250k at $50M Valuation From Forward Research

Forward Research the leading R&D firm for the Arweave ecosystem, purchased 5,728 shares of HackerNoon common stock shares at $42.55 per share, a $50M pre-money valuation.

This is great news for our shareholders, who’ve previously purchased shares at the 2019 equity crowdfunding price of $8.20 and at the 2020 strategic investment price of $11.35, which was the last issuing of new HackerNoon shares.

HackerNoon agreed to back up the HackerNoon library on Arweave. This ensures that HackerNoon, who recently exceeded one billion words published, and it’s contributing writers, will have Web3 backups for all their stories.

Pioneering Text Preservation with Arweave

Your stories should last forever.

HackerNoon not only publishes about blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and web3, but also works to integrate our publishing system with the emerging technologies that will make the next internet. We’re aiming to partner with products and companies like Arweave, who’ve made technological breakthroughs in digital publishing.

“We backed up the entire HackerNoon library on Arweave for about $58,” said HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke. “We’re still in the very early days of a truly decentralized internet, but when it comes to hosting and distributing digital text, we’re thrilled to be a small part of driving that cost towards zero.”

Stories are how we learn. Stories have the power to inspire, to guide, to change lives. We are working to make HackerNoon stories last forever.

More Web3 Integrations Already Live on HackerNoon

Before this partnership, we’ve built and integrated functions to further HackerNoon’s journey into the world of Web3.

Signup / Login with Wallet

1.0 is email, 2.0 is social, and 3.0 is the digital wallet. Really exciting for readers, writers, and partners to be able to use all HackerNoon has to offer with just a 3.0 identity.

NFTs as Profile Photos and Story Embeds

People can embeds NFTs into HackerNoon stories and use them as their profile avatars, which show up bordered by the notorious identity hexagon.

Noonies Tech Awards NFT Badges

Our yearly tech awards come with many prizes, including original NFT badge for all the winners to signify and preserve their accomplishments.

Crypto Data Price Pages: ex $BTC, $ETH, $AR

These coin price pages combine curated stories with timely data to form a qualitative and quantitate hub about each top cryptocurrency.

Web3 Writing Contests

By publishing with web3 tags, contributors enter to win prizes from paying customers such as Sandbox, Sora, Coinsbee, NOWpayments and Avalanche.

Blockchain games rankings: ex Axie Infinity, Gods Unchained

We monitor and measure the world’s most-trending blockchain games based on internet traction and blockchain activity.

Publishing More Web3

And of course everyday, publishing more ai, blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralization, web3, and related stories :-)

One of the most important things we think Web3 can help us achieve is preservation. With our partnership with Arweave, and the other integrations, we are working to further decentralize the HackerNoon, making us a more community-driven, trustworthy and sustainable place to read, write, learn and publish.

About HackerNoon

How hackers start their afternoons. HackerNoon’s built for technologists to read, write, and publish. We are an open and international community of 35,000+ contributing writers publishing stories and expertise for 4,000,000+ curious and insightful monthly readers. Founded in 2016, HackerNoon is an independent technology publishing platform run by David Smooke and Linh Smooke. Learn more about what humans think of HackerNoon.

About Arweave

The Arweave network is like Bitcoin, but for data: A permanent and decentralized web inside an open ledger. Permanent storage has many applications: from the preservation of humanity's most important data, to the hosting of truly decentralized and provably neutral web apps. The Arweave protocol is stable, mature and widely adopted. It acts as a map that points you to places you can learn about, use and build on Arweave.

In the comments below, let us know what you think of these integrations and what other Web3 integrations you’d like to see us roll out.