Bitcoin company Blockstream wins $55 million in Series A funding

According to coindesk, Blockstream has raised $55 million in its Series A funding round, led by AXA Strategic Ventures (the venture capital arm of French multinational insurance company AXA Group), Digital Garage (a Tokyo-based online payment company co-founded by Joi Ito), and Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures.

Other investors include AME Cloud Ventures, Blockchain Capital and Future\Perfect Ventures.

With the news, Blockstream has raised a total of $76 million in two rounds of funding. To date, the company’s tagging technology has been its sidechain product, which is currently in testing and can transfer assets from one blockchain to other blockchains.

Given the recent attention that private and permissioned blockchains have received, Blockstream sought to emphasize that interoperable blockchains will add functionality to the bitcoin network.

Blockstream CEO Austin Hill told CoinDesk:

“We were one of the first companies to articulate the vision of interoperable blockchains, where there won’t be just one blockchain, there will be many.”

However, Hill said the company remains committed to developing technology for the open-source bitcoin blockchain, which he called the “most mature and secure” infrastructure for blockchain services.

“What we don’t want is for the most powerful and secure blockchain protocol to become obsolete if people move to different protocols and technology stacks,” Hill continued, adding:

“We believe that it will be beneficial to society for all of these blockchains to become interoperable.”

Bitcoin and blockchain

In particular, Hill cited blockchain startup Digital Asset Holdings (DAH)’s decision to use Blockstream technology as part of the Open Ledger Project, an open-source blockchain initiative overseen by the Linux Foundation, as an example of how the bitcoin codebase could become more important for commercial applications.

Notably, this round comes on the heels of a $60 million round from Digital Asset, whose permissioned or private blockchain solution attracted 14 major banks and IBM, while Blockstream’s round was mostly VC-backed and targeted at the bitcoin network.

However, in Hill's view, these private chain companies are not competitors of Blockstream.

“Sometimes we’ll take chances, but we’re also working with our friends at Digital Asset. They’re giving us feedback on our code, and we’ve met with them and shown them the general architecture,” Hill continued.

He further emphasized:

“There are indications that what they are looking at is not what we are focused on. We are excited to see blockchain being used in syndicated lending, but we have a completely different background,” he added.

Promoting Bitcoin

Hill went on to say that this round of funding will be a vote of confidence for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, and he believes that Bitcoin’s underlying code will be widely used, even for private or permissioned blockchain solutions.

“Bitcoin is the most mature blockchain protocol out there, it’s been running a $2-7 billion security bounty, and it’s given people a lot of confidence over the years,” Hill explained.

Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/blockstream-55-million-series-a/
By Pete Rizzo
Translator: Satuoxi
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/blockstream-55-million)