Portal, a San Francisco, CA-based self-hosted Layer 2 wallet and cross-chain DEX on Bitcoin that makes atomic swaps between Bitcoin and other digital assets fast, secure, and private, closed an $8.5m funding round.
Backers included Coinbase Ventures, ArringtonXRP Capital, OKEx, Republic.co, Shima Ventures, LD Capital, Monday Capital, GenBlock, Taureon, Autonomy Capital, Krypital, B21 Capital as well as the senior executives and founders of Ethereum, DFINITY, MobileCoin, Tether (USDT), Galaxy Digital, Bitcoin.com, Republic, Centre.io, Polymath, Æternity, Hedera Hashgraph, Blockstream, Reef Finance, GlobeDX, FIO, Portion, and 4K.
The company will use the funds to build a self-sovereign and uncensorable DeFi on Bitcoin.
Led by CEO Eric Martindale, Portal aims to unlock Bitcoin’s potential to actually decentralize finance from spot markets to options, p2p lending and borrowing, all using on-chain, peer to peer contracts and without third party custody or control. The platform uses Bitcoin’s “hash time-locked contracts” to ensure that users retain full control over the funds offered up in trade, preventing counterparty risk and loss of funds. It incentivizes anonymous, self-interested third parties to intermediate transactions between mutually untrusting peers while guaranteeing security. At the core of Portal is its Layer 2 and Layer 3 technology, called Fabric, which is an open-source toolbox for deploying censorship-resistant layers on top of the Bitcoin base layer. Fabric enables the completely private, off-chain execution of “smart contracts” for asset issuance, P2P swaps, staking, liquidity, derivatives, and more.
FinSMEs
22/09/2021