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Bpifrance joins Bitcoin startups USD 8 million Series A

Wednesday 9 October 2019 09:42 CET | News

Partially state-owned French investment bank Bpifrance had made its first investment in a crypto startup, as the bank wants to play an active role in building Bitcoin’s infrastructure.

The lightning-focused startup ACINQ raised an USD 8 million Series A led by Idinvest Partners, with the participation of Serena and Bpifrance. This Series A brings ACINQ’s total funding up to USD 10 million, and will be used to grow the six-man team up to a dozen employees over 2020.

Different from Lightning Labs and Blockstream, both in Silicon Valley, ACINQ has its own lightning implementation, Eclair, in addition to the Eclair mobile wallet, and Strike, an application program interface (API) for lightning. The Eclair lightning wallet has garnered 15,000 downloads via Google Play since it launched in 2018.

To date, ACINQ operates the largest capacity lightning node on the network, supporting over 1,000 channels, according to CoinDesk.


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Keywords: Bpifrance, Bitcoin, lightening, investment, payments , cryptocurrency, wallet, mobile payments, France
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