https://i.imgur.com/RPHRlK8.pngLast week, while everyone was Reddit arguing over the block size non-issue, a rather substantial piece of news slipped under the radar.
Symbiont Raises $1.25M Seed Funding from Former NYSE CEO for ‘Smart Securities’ on the BlockchainAs Bitcoin Magazine reports:
In March, Bitcoin Magazine reported that Counterparty founders had joined with MathMoney f(x) and its founder Mark Smith as co-founders of the new fintech company SymbiontSymbiont has announced that it has secured $1.25 million of seed funding from influential financial market leaders including Duncan Niederauer, former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). A ‘Series A’ round of institutional investment is expected to close in the third quarter of 2015.
So why is this a big deal? Anyone who follows Counterparty would have seen this post on March 10: Announcing Symbiont – Building the Next-Generation Platform for Financial Markets
From that blog post:
With the approaching release of the Turing Complete smart contracts system on mainnet, we are at the point where less work needs to be done on the core protocol and more on tools and services that make use of it.
Symbiont is our next step in that direction. Because Symbiont’s technology platform will be based around Counterparty, the core Counterparty technology will remain open source, and will benefit from the greatly increased resources and sustainability this change brings.
We’re all very excited about the potential positive impacts not only to Counterparty, but to the blockchain’s adoption in the systems that power modern finance…
And then on March 31st, this was released:
Symbiont Creates Ripple Gateway for Counterparty XCP"Symbiont.io, the blockchain based FinTech startup bridging the gap between mainstream finance and crypto-financial technology, has announced its first product: a Ripple Gateway for Counterparty, over which XCP, Counterparty’s native currency, or any other Counterparty asset may be sent.
“Symbiont is proficient with all of the most advanced technologies in crypto-finance, and is always ready to use the right tool for the job. With this marriage of the Counterparty and Ripple networks, each benefits from compatibility with the other, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,”…
In summary, Symbiont is working with all of the leading technologies in crypto-finance (so others besides Counterparty too such as Hyperledger, Ripple, Sidechains. Being that the founders of Symbiont are also the founders of Counterparty, we would expect a large number of their projects to be XCP based. They also have an intimate knowledge of the technology, being that they built it.
For anyone who doesn’t know the intimate inner workings of Counterparty, here is a fact worth knowing (in regards to scarcity):
XCP is the fuel for smart contracts. When smart contracts are running, fuel is used for each execution step. Appropriately enough, this fuel is burned (destroyed). This means that the supply of XCP is continously decreasing. However, the cost of fuel adjusts proportionally as the supply of XCP goes down, so that it cannot reach 0
So how does this relate to pumps and dumps? While everyone was busy fucking around with worthless alt coins, investors who look at the fundamentals and pay attention to worthy news, were busy accumulating XCP.
It’s pretty clear, with the XCP price near all time lows the last few months, that anyone who believes in the Counterparty technology should have been taking advantage of the sale. With a $1.25m seed round from very prominent investors, and a Series A coming in Q3 (estimated), Symbiont has plenty of funding and backing to pursue a variety of Counterparty based projects. The XCP all time high spike was caused by the Medici news, which was far less significant than the recent news regarding Symbiont, and the relationship they have with Counterparty. Granted, that ATH spike was definitely attributed to some FOMO from the simultaneous BTC bubble, we see at least some upward movement from here. We don’t have a target, don’t care to make one, aren’t investment advisers and don’t give investment advice.
"We're also working on private blockchains and 'known' networks, as we think that might be a better application of the technology for some institutions. The idea with smart securities is that the battery comes included: to create contracts that can act on the blockchain autonomously, from issuance and corporate actions to decentralized secondary trading, clearing, settlement and transfer."
Smith says the early target is illiquid securities and funding activities — including both traditional venture-capital and crowdfunded private-equity transactions, as well as other applications like merchant banking, intercompany funding, and syndicated loans. The firm is already integrated into multiple tier-one banks' development programs and blockchain pilots. Many are focused on smaller use cases that don't already have processing intermediation in place, relying instead on spreadsheets and fax, and at least a few should be implemented by year's end.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/20836/ubs-bank-experimenting-smart-bonds-using-bitcoin-blockchain/Smart-bonds are one of the first publicly confirmed technologies the Swiss banking giant is said to be exploring since the launch of The innovation Lab in April to explore how blockchain technologies could improve the banking sector. The creation of the lab came after the publishing of an extensive report about the benefits of the blockchain by the international bank.
When the report was published, UBS Group CIO Oliver Bussmann told the Wall Street Journal, “I believe – and this is my personal view – that blockchain technology will not only change the way we do payments, but it will change the whole trading and settlement topic.”
