Blockstream, a San Francisco, California-based Bitcoin startup, raised $21m in seed funding.
The round was led by Reid Hoffman, Khosla Ventures and Real Ventures, with participation from Nicolas Berggruen, Crypto Currency Partners, Future\Perfect Ventures, Danny Hillis, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Max Levchin, Mosaic Ventures, Ray Ozzie, Ribbit Capital, Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures and others (nearly 40 investors in total).
Co-founded by Austin Hill and Adam Back, Blockstream plans to extend the capabilities of Bitcoin through sidechains technology and develop new ways to accelerate innovation in crypto currencies, open assets and smart contracts.
in a post on the company’s blog, Hill said:
Blockstream is the first startup focused on advancements to the core technology underpinning Bitcoin. The hundreds of millions invested in Bitcoin startups over the past few years have been to companies building applications and services on top of Bitcoin. Blockstream is the first company extending the capabilities at the protocol level to support massive scaling of Bitcoin and blockchain technology to a broad range of asset types. Put another way, the extension mechanism of sidechains, the company’s initial area of focus, allows any number of so far unthought of developments to happen in an open and interoperable way.
The company recently released a “sidechains paper”
FinSMEs
18/11/2014