Cryptocurrency exchange platform Stronghold has picked up $3.3m for its Seed round of funding.
The investment was led by Freestyle Capital founding general partner by Dave Samuel. This deal marks the first Silicon Valley venture-backed FinTech on a distributed ledger, according to the company.
Other investors into Stronghold include Hack VC, Precursor Ventures, Neural Capital, Array Ventures, Cantos Ventures, Square founding member Randy Reddig, So-Fi founder Dan Macklin, Civic founder Vinny Lingham, Protocol Ventures founder Rick Marini, Nerdwallet founder Jake Gibson, and Hired co-founder Mike Mickiewicz.
Stronghold is a digital currency exchange which hopes to create a full-service payment solution for global transactions. Its technology offers instant cryptocurrency transactions, tools to help buy and sell tokens and a managed wallet service.
The capital is being split for three separate routes of growth, improving the customer experience, building its Stellar network and developing the asset management platform.
Stronghold currently has more than 20,000 traders and has a growing over-the-counter (OTC) trading desk for cryptocurrencies. The company hopes to support both retail and OTC traders, by creating new features and flexibility.
Its Stellar network connects banks, payment systems, and people to support the transferring of money with little cost. The new equity will help the company to add more assets and liquidity to the system and expand its reach to more transactions. Currently supported tokens are Bitcoin, Ethereum and Lumens, with plans to add more soon.
Giving asset managers more flexibility while maintaining custody on behalf of clients is another area Stronghold is keen to improve.
Freestyle Capital founding general partner Dave Samuel said, ?Stronghold is committed to building something bigger than another fast-growth crypto exchange, which excited us at Freestyle. They can help add tremendous volume and liquidity to the world financial ecosystem by providing globally-connected asset trading and management capabilities to today investment advisors.p>
The company is currently hiring staff to its San Francisco and New Zealand offices.
Copyright ? 2018 FinTech Global
