Smart contract platform Symbiont receives $7 million in funding

According to multiple sources close to Symbiont, the smart securities trading platform has completed a $7 million round of financing, and the company's current valuation has reached $70 million.

However, in an email to Bitcoin Magazine, Symbiont co-founder Evan Wagner declined to comment on the matter, but said the company will make a formal announcement in the future.

Symbiont, which originated from the Counterparty project, was founded by former members of Overstock.com’s Medici project (now t0). According to Symbiont’s website, “Symbiont is building the first platform for issuing blockchain smart securities and trading smart securities.”

Smart securities is a term that describes intelligent contracts that can be programmed with specific rules. In the case of Symbiont, these smart contracts use blockchain to program traditional securities.

Symbiont was founded by Robby Demody, Evan Wagner and Adam Krellenstein. In March 2015, Counterparty, founded by the three, merged with Mark Smith's Money f(x).

Counterparty is one of the early Bitcoin 2.0 projects built on the Bitcoin blockchain. In essence, it allows users to perform different financial applications, not just Bitcoin's p2p payment network, and it is also protected by the Bitcoin network. Previously, the company raised $1.25 million in a seed round, and investors included Matt Andresen, former co-CEO of Citadel Derivatives Group, and Duncan Niederauer, former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.

“It’s great to see more venture capital coming into the space, which represents a great opportunity for blockchain solutions (in theory). However, we can’t use the amount of money raised as a marker of success. We will see some companies that raise very little and do very well, and some companies that raise a lot of money and fail in the end. We should focus on understanding the state of deployment, usage and actual customer innovation to evaluate the impact of blockchain on financial services,” said William Mougayar, general partner at Virtual Capital Ventures.

Original article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/smart-securities-trading-platform-symbiont-raises-million-1452613323
By Jacob Donnelly
Translation: Overnight porridge
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/symbiont-raises-7m ‎ ‎)