Very, very big news just broke in the Bitcoin space. According to TechCrunch, Bitcoin payment processor Bitpay has just raised $30 million in what would be the largest single round of fundraising ever in the Bitcoin space. It slightly surpasses the prior largest round, announced late last year by the other major Bitcoin payment processor Coinbase for $25 million.
BitPay is a company that is very familiar to readers of this site. It has experienced exponential growth over the past year or so. I most recently highlighted this in my post: BitPay is Now Adding 1,000 New Merchants Per Week.
This round implies a total valuation for BitPay of $160 million and it makes me wonder whether or not it could herald the beginning of another major move higher in the Bitcoin price. All year, I have been saying that I didn’t think the price would move until the summer. With summer less than two months away, I will become much more sensitive to news.
What makes this investment even more exciting is that Richard Branson (and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang) is purported to be involved. Considering his company Virgin Galatic has already been accepting bitcoin via BitPay, he is clearly impressed with the company and sees a very bright future for Bitcoin. As do I. This is big.
From TechCrunch:
We’re hearing that BitPay, a platform that processes payments in bitcoin for merchants, is raising the field’s biggest round yet. The company is raising $30 million on a roughly $160 million valuation in a round led by Index Ventures, with Richard Branson and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang participating. BitPay declined to comment.
With BitPay’s previous funding round, the company’s financing tops the combined $26 million that Boston-based rival Circle has raised from Accel Partners, or the $31 million that San Francisco-based Coinbase raised from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures or the $20 million round that Benchmark led for Xapo.
In other exciting Bitcoin news, the FEC has approved bitcoin donations to political committees, which you can read about here.
I’m pleased to say my Congressman was the first to announce he would be accepting donations in BTC.
Proud to be 1st member of Congress to accept #bitcoin conations for my campaign under today’s new FEC reg: http://t.co/w7ZcJw7d3Q
— Jared Polis (@jaredpolis) May 8, 2014
Full TechCrunch article here.
Oh, and if you like my work, consider donating Bitcoin below.
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G
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I am glad Polis is accepting bitcoin. I won’t be sending him any to support his statist views.
currencies have value because people are willing to hold them for increasingly long periods of time, even as a means of preserving value , …sometimes.
the only reason biticoin has hypothetical enduring value (over decades) is because its the least dirtiest shirt.
if and when the perpetual war of debasement stops , even for a year or two while a predictable mini-crash happens, bitcoin will crash badly while the usd gains in value.
the price of the coin relative to the usd is essentially a put option on the dollar. if the market crashes because of a stengthening of the dollar ( yields start rising ) than bitcoin prices have serious downward pressure.
the network itself, is another question. i personally believe it is enduring and that a crash will lay the ground work for the next major buildout of bitcoin network by people who want to use bitcoin to purchase goods and services directly, not by people who want to cash out their bitcoin to usd to buy goods and services through bitcoin.
most long term believers in bitcoin don’t care about pumping the price. I for one actually am hoping for a crash to 100 dollars or less as an entry point to begin USING bitcoin instead of ‘investing’ in it.
seriously. who invests in money? usually doing so means the opposite of holding money under the mattress, the equivalent of banking your bitcoin in a 0% interest bearing wallet .
treasuries? maybe 2% means something if your managing billions of pension dollars. but it means squat if you are managing your limited amount of bitcoin. transaction costs counterparty risk and time risk alone are enough to make 2% more or less the same as cash under the mattress.
so why should i ‘invest’ in bitcoin when it remains a network of payment processing primarily used for churning onling gambling transactions. the truth remains very few businesses and commercial service providers want to maintain the bitoins they recive as a medium of payment for their own savings.
untilt they do, or they use these coins to pay their own raw goods and service providers and employees—-you really have no virtuous economic closed circuit using bitcoin.
you have a bunch of people plowying their dollars into bitcoin like a momo stock. a casino chip essentially.
and don’t forget half of all bit-coins out there are still in hte handa of a few hundred people who accumulated their coins at an average price below 6 bucks.
buying bitcoin at this point is, in part, giving those guy a slow exit.
bitcoin remains overpriced. and the silicon valley bubble heads that have too much monopoly money on their hands courtesy of the trickle down fed waterfall of zirp money doesn’t change this fact.
I know its tempting to see the bitcoin startup scene as funamentally differenct than advertising and entertainment based startups like facebook google, linkedin grpn zynga etc…..
but the money is all coming from the same place. and money is momentum. so be careful in making predictions mike.
Funny that you tell Mike to be careful making predictions after making predictions.
Also, I didn’t see Mike make any predictions.
Typo in the headline, Bro! “Larget”
Fixed, thank you very much!
You bet. I disagree with some of your BS, but support the sentiment behind the effort and agree with the bulk of your analyses. Keep up the good work!