Our Blockseed Loan: The Collateral, the Borrower, and Our Diligence

Some of you have asked whether Cashaa lent against weak collateral without properly examining the borrower. That is a fair question and we take it seriously. This update sets out what secures the loan, who stands behind it, and how we evaluated it.

It builds on the two statements before it. In our first update (9 July 2026) we set out in full how the withdrawal freeze came about and the loan at the centre of it. In our second update (25 July 2026) we confirmed that every other position had been closed, leaving this one defaulted facility. This update goes one level deeper, into the collateral itself.

The loan is secured by shares of Bloq Inc. (Series Seed-2 Preferred). This is equity in an operating company with an institutional shareholder base — not a speculative token, and not a shell vehicle.

Bloq is an enterprise blockchain company founded in 2015 by Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik and industry investor Matt Roszak. It is based in Chicago. Garzik is Bloq’s co-founder and chief executive; Roszak is co-founder and chairman.

Garzik was one of the earliest Bitcoin Core developers after Satoshi Nakamoto’s departure, and he authored the Drivechain sidechain proposal (BIP 300/301). Roszak is also a founding partner of Tally Capital, has testified as an expert before the US Congress and has spoken at the Brookings Institution, and is chairman of the Chamber of Digital Commerce.

Garzik framed Bloq on the Red Hat model: a company that acts as a mediator between a sometimes divided open-source community and the businesses that want to build on what that community develops. The aim was to make open blockchain technology usable by serious institutions without closing it off.

Sources: CoinDesk, Altss company profile.

Bloq is best understood as a parent company that builds, incubates and holds stakes in a family of blockchain ventures. The ventures cover:

• BloqDAO — infrastructure and investment DAO
• Hemi — a Bitcoin–Ethereum network
• Odyssey — smart wallet
• CoreSemi — open silicon
• Capsule — composable payments
• Titan — mining infrastructure
• Lumerin — AI data routing
• Atmos — web3 gaming
• Vesper — yield aggregator
• Metronome — synthetics and smart farming

This matters for the collateral. A holding in Bloq is exposure to a diversified group of ventures across payments, wallets, DeFi, mining, gaming, hardware and Bitcoin infrastructure. It is not a bet on one product. The Bloq fund holds majority stakes in several of these.

• Enterprise platform. BloqEnterprise included the BloqCloud compute platform, BloqWallet, the BloqRouter networking tool, the BloqDev SDK and testnet framework, BloqView analytics, and the BloqOra smart contract platform. BloqThink, its consulting division, helped businesses build blockchain applications.
• BloqCloud. Managed nodes and APIs for networks reported to include Ethereum, Algorand and Avalanche. Reliable node infrastructure lowers the barrier for developers building on public chains.
• BloqLabs. Launched in 2017, it was one of the first members to join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance in March 2017, with a focus on open-source development.
• Metronome. Announced on 24 October 2017 with an initial supply of 10 million tokens, 8 million of which were sold in a descending-price auction. The founders said the design would “give a broad number of people a chance to own Metronomes, and will prevent people with deep-pockets taking outsize positions in the currency.” It was built to run across existing networks — specifically the Ethereum and Bitcoin-based networks — and to let owners transfer Metronome between them.
• Vesper, Lumerin, Titan and others. Bloq’s own announcements list Vesper (described by Roszak as a well-audited DeFi yield aggregator), Lumerin (tradable bitcoin mining power), Metronome (synthetics), Atmos (gaming), Titan (bitcoin mining pools), Capsule (smart digital asset transfers) and BloqStake (staking).

Sources: CoinDesk, Fortune (24 October 2017), Bloq via Business Wire (20 June 2023). The BloqCloud network list is drawn from a Dealroom company profile.

Max Sanchez joined Garzik’s incubator programme at Bloq in 2016, where he co-founded VeriBlock. That venture did not take off, but the technology he developed there carried into the next one: in 2024 he and Garzik launched Hemi Labs, announced at the Bitcoin 2024 conference and described in its own announcement as a modular blockchain network powered by Bitcoin and Ethereum. Its design builds a full Bitcoin node into the Ethereum Virtual Machine, so that Ethereum smart contracts can speak to Bitcoin directly.

In September 2024 Hemi Labs closed a first funding round of $15 million, led by Binance Labs, Breyer Capital and Big Brain Holdings. Hemi is one of the ventures listed in the Bloq ecosystem above, and it is the most recent public evidence that these founders are still building and still able to raise institutional capital.

Sources: Fortune (18 September 2024), Hemi Labs via Business Wire (17 September 2024).

In June 2023, Crain’s Chicago Business named Bloq to its Fast 50 list, placing it as Chicago’s tenth fastest-growing company over five years. Bloq’s client base has reportedly included Discover, Fidelity and Citi.

Sources: Bloq via Business Wire (20 June 2023) for the Crain’s ranking; the client list is drawn from a Dealroom company profile and is not confirmed by Bloq’s own announcements.

Reported investors include Digital Currency Group, Fenbushi Capital, CMT Digital, SixThirty Ventures, Digital Finance Group, Ozmen Ventures, Block.one, Galaxy Interactive, New Alchemy and S5V. Roszak’s Tally Capital has itself invested in Block.one, Blockstream, Civic, Factom, Orchid, Qtum and others.

Source: Dealroom company profiles. These are third-party reported holdings and are not confirmed by Bloq’s own announcements.

Before the collateral was approved, and before the facility was drawn, our work covered the following:

• Review of Bloq’s financials and capitalisation table before the loan collateral was approved.
• Review of the ecosystem structure and Bloq’s holdings in each venture.
• Legal review of the share class, its rights and its transfer restrictions, by Cashaa counsel.
• Valuation basis and how the collateral value was set — the face value alone was more than the value of the loan.
• Borrower assessment: KYC and KYB, track record, and source of repayment.
• Direct engagement with Bloq on transfer mechanics. Bloq was also a party to the lien-marking of the collateral for the purpose of the loan, through a tri-partite agreement.

These are private shares, not freely tradable, and any resale is subject to the company’s rights and consent. We have never claimed otherwise, and it shaped how we sized and structured the position. A secured position in a real company is not a risk-free position, and we won’t present it as one.

We are actively working with the relevant parties to bring this position to a close, and the documentation is currently being finalised. Discussions are ongoing and moving forward.

For confidentiality reasons we are not able to share further detail at this stage. We know that is frustrating, and we appreciate your patience. We will update this community as soon as we are able to say more.

We will keep answering questions on this as directly as we can. If there is something here you want taken further, write to us at support@cashaa.com or raise it in our community channels, and we will address it in the next update.

— Cashaa Leadership

Sources. Everything in this update about Bloq Inc. and its ventures is publicly reported information about a third party, not our own verified claim, and is cited where it is used:

• CoinDesk — “Bloq” · founding, the Red Hat framing, BloqEnterprise, BloqLabs and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
• Altss — Bloq company profile · Chicago base, founder roles, Tally Capital
• Fortune, 24 October 2017 · the Metronome announcement, token supply and auction mechanics
• Bloq via Business Wire, 20 June 2023 · the Crain’s Chicago Business Fast 50 ranking and the venture list
• Fortune, 18 September 2024 and Hemi Labs via Business Wire, 17 September 2024 · Hemi Labs, the Bloq incubator link through VeriBlock, and the $15 million funding round
• Dealroom company profiles · BloqCloud’s supported networks, the reported client list and the reported investor list. These are access-restricted third-party profiles, so they are cited but not linked.