A San Francisco company, Coinbase, announced on Thursday that it had raised $25 million from some prominent venture capitalists in the largest-ever fund-raising round for a Bitcoin company.
The company enables merchants to accept digital money for ordinary purchases, and allows customers to trade Bitcoins and hold them in online wallets. Coinbase hosts 600,000 online wallets, up from 200,000 in August.
The investors behind Coinbase include some of the biggest names in venture capital, like Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz , which is investing in Coinbase for the first time in the current series B round.
Chris Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is joining the Coinbase board. He used the announcement to extol the possibilities of Bitcoin.
“The designers of the web built placeholders for a system that moved money, but never successfully completed it,” Mr Dixon said. “Bitcoin is the first plausible proposal for an economic protocol for the Internet.”
Coinbase said it planned to use the money to expand its staff and “promote the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin.”
Friday, December 13, 2013
Venture Capital Bets Big on Bitcoin
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