Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is leading a group of investors into funding the merchant services firm BitPay.
BitPay, which offers corporate Bitcoin services, said it had not been looking for funding but the opportunity was too good to turn down.
BitPay founder and CEO Tony Gallippi said: “We raised seed funding in January and February and still had some left so we weren’t looking for money. They approached us, which was a nice surprise because we’d heard that they’d got as far as due diligence with another company in this space. We were really impressed with their experience and energy.”
Gallippi said BitPay would spend the money on hiring more staff and continuing to build the platform. He said any process involving lawyers takes time but it “was not as painful as we feared.”
Asked about yesterday’s action against Dwolla Gallippi said much of the coverage was wrong and once you looked at the actual warrant it was clear it was a very specific problem of non-compliance – “the shell company was not licensed to do what it was doing.”CoinDesk
Peter Thiel & Founders Fund lead $2m funding round in BitPay
John Oates
3 comments:
Funding in dollars ofc, not in bitcoins.
Peter Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal as an alternative payments system. I am sure he is seeing Bitcoin in similar terms. With the onset of globalization and transnational transactions becoming common alternative payment systems work very well.
Incidentally, Citi tried to compete in this market some time ago and failed. It never got over the ground, and as far as I can see it disappeared.
But as alternative payment systems catch on in making payments more efficient, the big banks will ramp up their own alternatives.
There will be winners and losers and it's way too early to tell how this is going to develop.
maybe this is what they are going to use on the sea-steading floating cities...
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