Opportunities for Expansion
CoinAlpha Inc., a Silicon Valley-based blockchain company, has announced that it will be creating a full-service digital asset management infrastructure after raising $3.5 million in seed funding. The fundraising was headed up by Bain Capital Ventures, with assistance from Ironfire Ventures, SharesPost, and Stanford University’s StartX Fund. The funds will allow the company to add financial instruments, integrate with custody providers, and connect to more trading venues.
CEO Michael Feng launched CoinAlpha in 2017, along with Martin Kou, Carlo Las Marias, and Yvonne Zhang. Their goal was to create a transparent and effective asset management ecosystem. CoinAlpha’s founders share experience from a variety of sectors in the financial and technology industries, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Apple, and Nitro.
The CoinAlpha founders believe that blockchain technology will make deep and lasting changes to the financial sector. Citing the various ways new technologies have changed other industries, they say that CoinAlpha looks to change finance from a centralized to a decentralized system, allowing smaller players to keep pace with large companies that are given an advantage by the finance industry’s centralized infrastructure.
The founders took cues from Ethereum, as well as their experiences during the 2008 financial crisis to create CoinAlpha. “The entire financial system was a tangled web of intermediaries, and it remains the same today,” said Feng in the press release. “After I read the Ethereum whitepaper in 2014, I was captivated because smart contracts could reinvent how derivatives and other financial products by turning the logic contained in paper contracts into code permanently recorded on the blockchain. In 2017, the technology had matured to an extent it was finally possible, which allowed us to start CoinAlpha.”
The team chose to use the blockchain to take the logic of paper contracts and turn them into permanently recorded code. The CoinAlpha ecosystem aims to use machine learning in addition to smart contracts to verify and enforce performance without recourse to a third party.
SharesPost Investment Platform Opens New Avenues
SharesPost, one of CoinAlpha’s new partners, is a top private securities investment platform and has more than 150,000 investors in its customer network. Their partnership paves the way to produce crypto index products for investors. This, in turn, will give SharesPost’s customer base a way to become part of the crypto market.
“The partnership is very exciting for both organizations,” Feng said the same press release. “It combines CoinAlpha’s expertise in blockchain engineering and algorithmic cryptocurrency trade execution with SharesPost’s track record of financial innovations, 150k-strong investor network, and regulatory compliant platform.”
In addition to allowing CoinAlpha to take advantage of SharesPost’s customer base and relevant licensing, the partnership will give SharesPost access to CoinAlpha’s crypto data, technology, and services, which will improve the company’s security and efficiency.
SharesPost played a part in the fundraising efforts for CoinAlpha in conjunction with Bain Capital Ventures.