On August 3, Galoy, the fintech startup that created the Bitcoin Beach Wallet, released two statements. First, according to the company’s inaugural release, the startup has secured $4 million from critical investors to “develop bitcoin-native banking infrastructure.” Hivemind Ventures served as the funding round’s lead investor.
At the same time, Alphapoint, Valor Equity Partners, Timechain, El Zonte Capital, Kingsway Capital, and Trammell Venture Partners also contributed to the most recent round of funding. According to Galoy, “other notable bitcoin investors” participated in the investment round.
Max Webster, the founder of Hivemind Ventures, thinks open source bitcoin banking is crucial for promoting the widespread use of innovations like the Lightning Network. In a news release, Webster said, “Galoy dramatically lowers the barrier for any community or organization to become their own bank and plug into the world’s first open monetary and payments standard.”
To grow the payments network and enable peer-to-peer transactions with cheaper fees than on-chain transactions, the Lightning Network (LN), a layer two (L2) protocol built on top of Bitcoin, was created. Nicolas Burtey, the creator of Galoy, firmly believes that LN will dominate BTC payments in the future.
The disruption of traditional finance by bitcoin and Lightning is no secret, Burtey said during the announcement of the fundraiser. We envision the Galoy team, contributors, and clients as a community coming together to forge a path toward a more transparent and inclusive global financial system.
About $79.60 million, or roughly 3,418.14 BTC, is locked in the LN system. Galoy announced the fundraiser and the release of Stablesats, a brand-new product. The Stablesats product is one of the newest additions to the cryptocurrency payment platform, according to a blog post by Galoy. According to Galoy’s blog post, “An alternative to stablecoins or fiat bank integration, Stablesats uses derivatives contracts to create a bitcoin-backed synthetic dollar pegged to USD.”
The Stablesats product includes a webpage that describes it in depth and explains how to use the technology. Github is where you may find Galoy’s open-source code for Stablesats and its other products. The team explains that Stablesats employs “an instrument called perpetual inverse swap to create synthetic USD.” The team notes there are “other interesting avenues to explore.”
