[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcdThwai2V0]
Bitcoin application development platform, Chain has just raised a $9.5 million round of capital from investors including Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures, Pantera Capital, Thrive Capital, and SV Angel. In total, the Glendale-based startup has raised $13.7 million.
“This funding will allow us to invest heavily in building the world’s most reliable and robust bitcoin infrastructure for developers, enterprises, and financial institutions,” said Adam Ludwin, co-founder of Chain in a blog post.
Currently, Chain is in beta and offers a blockchain API to developers free of charge. By being able to interact with the Blockchain, the public ledger for all bitcoin transactions, Chain’s API promises new ways to make bitcoin payments. Recently, in July 2014, Chain released an iOS demo app that allowed users to send bitcoin using the iPhone 5S fingerprint recognition technology.
Bitcoin’s ability to be a secure, anonymous, low-cost and programmable currency is increasingly attracting interest from the venture capital community. The currency is seen as a secure and low cost solution for many transactional and banking problems the world over. In third world countries especially where the trust in the banking system is low and transactional costs are high bitcoin’s potential is viewed to be enormous. Because a lot of banking in Africa is already done over mobile phones, Chain’s focus on mobile bitcoin payments may be particularly useful.
Ludwin sees Chain’s API as a means to help mainstream bitcoin usage. Still early days for the currency, bitcoin is difficult for many people and institutions to use.
In an interview with Fortune.com, Ludwin said, “The blockchain is this mammoth network that is quite difficult to build on…. It’s like telecom or credit card processing or web hosting where certain people at the beginning tend to do it themselves but, over time, it matures and bigger companies start accessing it. So what you need is reliability and real service-level agreements. When a big bank wants to connect to the blockchain, they want an expert to help them. We want that to be us.”
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