itBit, which is based in Singapore, has fund-raised $5.5m and will use the best part of it to invest in the technology to bitcoin.
As Rich Teo, the CEO in itBit, and Jason Melo, the CTO in itBit, told CoinDesk their firm is the first bitcoin exchanger created based on worldwide equities exchange standards, so it is providing a brand new level of expertness, fail-safety and security to bitcoin commerce.
Major investors of the latest fund-raising round are: Canaan Partners and RRE Ventures, Liberty City Ventures, Ben Davenport and Jay Jordan. itBit engine is based on a NASDAQ open source software.
Existing and former virtual currency exchangers have came across serious technical problems touching security and fail-safety.
The firm's executives mentioned that the NASDAQ’s open-source technology of exchange permits itBit to use bitcoin within capacious and well-known money services system. The NASDAQ technology conjointly provides itBit's market maker and institutional players a connectivity which is of very high quality and short delay.
itBit would actually like to fascinate investors which are not retail brokers. Teo and Melo aforementioned that itBit additionally uses a method to verify accredited investors.
They explained, that itBit has to manually review every investor's application in each specific case, because in the USA customers should be a joint stock company. They serve the interests of caution to continually make sure that they are acting accordingly to current regulation.
Presently there are some firms that are making an attempt to bring bitcoin investment and commerce to the mass market. For example, Coinsetter as a startup has collected $500,000 in the beginning of this year and now it is building platform for trading bitcoins.
Vaurum, that is a Boost VC-backed firm, has created an engine that established brokers may use to provide private investors higher access to digital currencies.
Even though in the market there are different worth distributed digital currencies, itBit is currently concentrating its power only on bitcoin. The members of the company board said: "We are keeping an eye on other currencies but don’t have a roadmap to share yet on how they might be integrated. Right now we are quite focused on bitcoin."
They strongly consider that Singapore, which is worldwide known as a hub for Asian markets, right now is the best place to develop a bitcoin company.
Teo and Melo added that regulators in Singapore are forward-minded and clear-sighted, and stand first on the way to financial innovation. The firm selected Singapore as a base due to 2 major criteria.
The first, Singapore is a member of FATF, which means it corresponds to international standards for combating money laundering and terrorism financing. The second, Singapore has a well-minded to bitcoin businesses regulative and banking systems. In addition, regulators are in a good relationship with the Monetary Authority of Singapore.