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Coinsetter Lands $500K

By on April 9, 2013
CoinSetter NYC forex digital currency trading platform

Coinsetter, a New York City-based startup looking to launch a new Forex trading platform for Bitcoin, announced today that it has raised $500,000 in seed capital. The round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners and SecondMarket founder and CEO Barry Silbert (through his Bitcoin Opportunity Fund), with participation from angel investors like Jimmy Furland, a London-based technology entrepreneur, Microsoft Head of Corporate Strategy, Charles Songhurst, and Facebook Product Lead, Ben Davenport.

The investment comes at a time when there’s been a flurry of new interest in Bitcoin, given that the crypto-currency just officially became a billion-dollar market at the end of March. Since then, venture capitalists have weighed in on what they love about Bitcoin, including its potential to not only “disrupt multi-billion-dollar markets, but in doing so also create new big markets,” Lightspeed Ventures’ Jeremy Liew wrote in TechCrunch this weekend.

Coinsetter is one of many that see opportunity in applying familiar market practices to the wild, wacky and virtual world of Bitcoin. With its new funding in tow, the New York City-based startup plans to launch a Forex trading platform for Bitcoin, specifically one that allows people to make leveraged trades on margin and short the market. While these practices are available in all mature markets, says co-founder Jaron Lukasiewicz, “they’re virtually absent in the Bitcoin space.”

Coinsetter wants to make Bitcoin more accessible to both mainstream and institutional users by focusing on security, transparency and by offering a simple user experience. On top of that, the startup plans to launch an ancillary arm that will offer a “scalable solution for accredited investors and institutions to earn interest on their bitcoins,” Lukasiewicz says.

The co-founder also says that the company plans to go out of its way to offer added layers of security and protection that go beyond what the market currently offers, including “insurance against hacks,” and operate within the legal framework of the U.S., he says. By doing so, the co-founders believe that the trading platform can become an attractive service for Bitcoin traders as well as Forex traders and online gamblers.

To put his money where his mouth is, Lukasiewicz, a former investment banker, has said that he will “put up at least $50,000 of his own money towards the platform’s initial margin reserves,” as reported by The Bitcoin Trader. The article goes on to point out that, while promising, Coinsetter isn’t the only service looking to offer margin trading.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/09/coinsetter-lands-500k-from-secondmarket-founder-others-to-help-bring-leverage-shorting-to-bitcoin-trade/

 

*Excerpt from TechCrunch. News article copyright Rip Empson at TechCrunch.

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