Blockchain has quickly evolved beyond its financial origins and crypto pump-and-dump frenzy. From agricultural companies to auto manufacturers, established sectors have come to embrace the decentralized technology. But as with other nascent fields, web3 has a shortage of skilled programmers that is hindering the creative growth of the industry. That's a gap that SettleMint is trying to close with its low-code platform for blockchain engineers.

"Less than 1% of developers in Europe have any experience in web3," observes SettleMint's co-founder and CEO Matthew Van Niekerk. People learning Solidity from scratch could take anywhere from three to 18 months to hone their skills in the Ethereum programming language, he tells TechCrunch in an interview.

The company's solution is a tool that does away with a lot of the blockchain programming complexity and allows developers to create decentralized applications within "a couple of weeks." The development platform is chain-agnostic, meaning it's compatible with both private, permissioned networks and public, permissionless ones.

Marketplaces like OpenSea have lowered the barriers to entry for NFT creators, but the utility of blockchain is far more than authenticating the ownership of a JPEG. One of SettleMint's customers is a university in Indonesia that created a parallel blockchain-based voting system for the country's 2019 election to ensure fair results. Another user, the state of Jharkhand in India, implemented blockchain to track and add transparency to seed supply chains. In the financial realm, banks are using SettleMint to tokenize security products to enable immutable and instant transactions.

A blockchain-as-a-service business tailored to organizations doesn't really deliver the level of stunning growth seen in flashy GameFi or NFT startups. But SettleMint, which is headquartered in Belgium with teams in the UAE, Singapore, and India, is exactly the type of "builders" investors hunt down during crypto winter.