Blockstream: $21 Million Funding Will Drive Bitcoin Development

While VC firms have demonstrated an overwhelming interest in funding the wider bitcoin industry, its core developers have long argued that contributions to the advancement of its protocol have lagged dangerously behind.
To the team behind Blockstream, however, its $21m funding round announced yesterday represents the first concerted execution of capital toward correcting this imbalance.
The funding will be used principally by the company to realize its sidechains proposal on the bitcoin network, which would allow assets to be exchanged across multiple blockchains via a two-way pegging system. Blockstream contends this would allow developers new freedoms of experimentation and provide the network with a way to trial potential alterations.
Speaking to CoinDesk, CEO Austin Hill sought to frame the funding as an investment that is as revolutionary as those contributed to space transportation pioneer SpaceX and electronic car giant Tesla Motors.
He said:
“These things didn’t happen overnight, they took a concentrated effort to actually move science and technology forward, and bitcoin requires that. But we’re only millimeters in a potential marathon of digitizing assets, and it’s very, very important that we take that long view.”
In turn, both Hill and co-founder Adam Back asserted that the experienced tech veterans that took part in the round – including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yangand Google chairman Eric Schmidt – recognize that bitcoin’s core technology requires massive funding to reach its full potential, and that Blockstream’s investors share its long-term vision for bitcoin.
“We showed them our vision for how bitcoin and the blockchain could evolve, and they saw the same potential we did,” Hill added. “They saw that it was going to be an entire revolution in computing, distributed trust, [and] security, and they bought into it and gave us their support.”

This post was published at Coin Desk on November 18, 2014.