A firm called Mosaic Ventures based in London has revealed they were a participant in the $55 million Series A financing for the company Blockstream. They also invested in the business in 2014 at a time when Bitcoin was claimed to be dying, and centralized blockchains were coming into the industry. However, the investment firm says the company is made up of “long-term believers” of the technology and it sees a lot of potential with the Blockstream business model.
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The firm says they’ve been invested in Blockstream for 18 months, and the Bitcoin industry has grown. The blog post authored by Simon Levene says growth is happening but “not explosively so” and there may be some reasons for this which they will explore in a future post. They mention a lot of the members of Blockstream are Bitcoin core developers and it understands the governance structure of core. Mosaic’s blog post states:
“The governance of Bitcoin Core, like many other open source projects, is technocratic, where a handful of “core devs” (a dynamic group that includes several Blockstream team-members) deliberate the merits of various changes to the protocol, and decide how to move the puck forward, hoping to convince each other and the wider industry of their consensus. The technocracy is at least meritocratic, in the sense that the core devs are recognized — by their peers, the community itself — based on their significant contributions to the code. For an emergent platform that only a small number of people on the planet holistically understand, this process is not perfect, but that seems to be the best we have for now.” Simon Levene, Mosaic Investments
“Sidechains are not a theory. Blockstream launched its first sidechain, called Elements, in June 2015 as an open developer platform, and is launching a commercial version now, called Liquid, to provide an interchange settlement layer for Bitcoin exchanges and brokerages. It works. And the company’s architectural approach has also been embraced by independent developers, including, for example, the cryptographer Sergio Demian Lerner, whose Rootstock project is a sidechain initiative to connect Bitcoin Core to Ethereum, a generally programmable blockchain-based platform.” Simon Levene, Mosaic Investments
What do you think about Mosaic Ventures description of Blockstream’s potential? Would you agree? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Mosaic Ventures blog, and Blockstream’s website