"This is part of the funding we're trying to
raise and we are very close to landing additional funding," said
Samman.
The investment in BTC is the sixth Bitcoin-denominated position
from the first SeedCoin fund. The other five businesses are
Cryptopay, CoinSimple, MexBT, Hive and zSIM, Seedcoin said in a
statement. SeedCoin is a startup "incubator" providing
early-stage investment to digital currency companies.
BTC, which started with a $150,000 investment, briefly suspended
trading on its platform after its bitcoin exchange partner,
Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, went dark in February following weeks of
turmoil. Mt. Gox eventually filed for bankruptcy protection.
Prior to the suspension, BTC offered derivatives on Mt. Gox
prices.
Samman said the platform resumed trading on March 10 and now
offers derivatives on BitStamp prices. BitStamp is a bitcoin
exchange based in Slovenia and is now considered the world's
largest based on trading volume.
According to Bitcoin Charts, BitStamp has 30-day U.S. dollar
volume of about $290 million.
Derivatives volume has been light since BTC resumed trading,
Samman said.
"It has been picking up slightly. We're nowhere near the volumes
we have seen before the collapse of Mt. Gox," Samman said. "I
think that's just a bitcoin-wide problem at the moment."
BTC has brokered more than $44 million in bitcoin derivative
trades since it launched in April 2013.
When Mt. Gox collapsed, BTC lost all of the bitcoins it had
stored with the failed exchange. However, even before the Mt.
Gox failure, BTC had already started withdrawing funds and
reducing its exposure to the exchange because of worries about
its future.
(Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfus;
editing by Andre Grenon)
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