OB1, the development company behind the OpenBazaar decentralized online market, raised $ 5 million in a Series A financing round
According to a press release, investors in this round include Chinese giant Bitmain Bitmain and Canadian venture capital firm OMERS Ventures.
While some blockchain companies view initial coin offerings as an alternative to traditional fundraising, players like OB1 clearly welcome both. In conjunction with the new venture capital funding, the startup plans to launch its own token later this year, as announced at the San Francisco Token Summit last December.
Also announced today, the platform will launch a program of verified moderators later this week.
OB1 stated in the release:
"We are planning this year to release web and mobile versions of the application, while providing users with new ways to trade with each other, such as making requests and buying and selling cryptocurrencies."
The team added support for bitcoin cash, zcash and litecoin in February. The goal of his own upcoming token is to address the pain points across the platform, and ultimately the industry.
"You have this huge amount of content that people are dumping on the decentralized web or in OB," said firm CEO Brian Hoffman at the International Business Times. "And there is not Google there to clean it and serve it and organize it."
"I think our first step is to look at how a token could allow merchants and advertisers to create engaging content and contribute to business creation," he said.
As ambitious as these plans are, startup investors include some of the biggest names in the cryptocurrency industry.
Bitmain is the newest addition to a list that already counted Andreessen Horowitz and angel investor William Mougayar.
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