The typical Venture Capitalists foray into Silicon-Valley-centred technology is now being replicated in the Bitcoin space.
The growing importance of building an infrastructure through which common businesses can quickly and seamlessly adopt the language and mode of bitcoin transactions appears to be the primary driver behind the latest round of large-sized funding flowing into bitcoin technological innovation.
A case in point: API Developer Chain’s $9.5 Million
The significance of the recently announced funding that Block-chain API developer Chain received is not rooted in the amount raised, but in the individuals involved.
Chain began its services in January this year and including this round of funds has raised $13.7 m to-date.
Chain’s founder Adam Ludwin said, “We’re very interested in helping bitcoin to evolve and to be leading contributors in helping bitcoin scale and be more robust going forward.”
The line-up of investors includes Barry Silbert, Bitcoin Opportunity Corp. founder, a famous name in bitcoin-entrepreneurship, and recent investor in India-based Unocoin, along with Khosla Ventures, the original founders of now Oracle-owned Sun Microsystems, and Scott Banister, 500 Startups, Homebrew and Pantera Captial. Seed-founders of Chain too ensured they remain part of the second round of funding by topping-up their stakes. These include Thrive Capital, RRE Ventures as well as SV Angel.
More significantly, Chain will have a key-player join its management – Keith Rabois, ex-PayPal, ex-Square, ex-LinkedIn VP.
Transformative in nature: Chain’s products and services
With such an impressive line-up of investors, Chain looks set to make a big imprint on the digital currency ecosystem.
Ludwin also mentioned that, his team “is also exploring developments in other digital currencies, specifically mentioning ethereum, ripple and stellar. We are slowly, deliberately, but definitely bringing other currencies to our platform.”