Have you guys read about the coinbase news? Front page FT?
Source:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/84c95976-633a-11e3-886f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2nHkt1cbZAuthor:
Stephen Foley
A Silicon Valley company that allows speculators and merchants to trade Bitcoin has raised $25m in venture capital funding in the largest investment so far in a virtual currency business.
As a result of the deal, San Francisco-based Coinbase will have two of the most prominent venture capitalists in the US join its board and it has also hired the head developer of the open source software behind Bitcoin as a consultant.
The $25m funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, the investment firm led by Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, with existing backers Union Square Ventures and Ribbit Capital also putting in additional money.
The high-profile backing puts Coinbase at the head of a pack of nascent businesses that are jostling for funding and for market share in the experimental Bitcoin economy.
Coinbase was founded last year by Brian Armstrong, formerly a software developer at the room rental website Airbnb, and Fred Ehrsam, who once traded foreign exchange for Goldman Sachs.
The company said on Thursday that the number of people using its Bitcoin wallet, currency exchange or payments platform for merchants had doubled to 600,000 in less than two months.
Ten thousand people were signing up every day, it said.
“Coinbase is now the most widely used Bitcoin service in the US,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon wrote on his blog. Mr Dixon will join the board of Coinbase along with Union Square Ventures founder Fred Wilson.
“We think Coinbase can significantly accelerate Bitcoin’s proliferation and, as that happens, the internet will enter a new phase of invention and opportunity,” Mr Dixon said.
Venture capitalists are betting that Bitcoin can be used to disrupt the traditional business of online payments, since transactions do not go through traditional banks and instead are recorded in software code stored across a peer-to-peer network of computers.
Coinbase said on Thursday that it had hired Gavin Andresen, chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, as an adviser. The foundation was created to advocate for Bitcoin’s adoption and to suggest improvements to the open source software behind the virtual currency.
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