Coinbase, a San Francisco-based Bitcoin start-up that aims to help virtual currencies get mainstreamed, announced on Thursaday, December 12, that it had led a $25 million fund-raising round.
Chris Dixon, a partner at venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, is excited about this new development.
"It's hard to overstate the excitement of a certain segment of the technology," Dixon, who will join Coinbase's board, told The New York Times. "Every day somebody comes in and says, 'Bitcoin is going to be as big as the Internet.'"
Coinbase's latest investment is by far the biggest fund-raising investment to date by a Bitcoin company. Last October, Circle Internet Financial, another start-up that processes digital payments for merchants, was able to raise $9 million. One of its investors is Accel Partners.
According to the report, mainstream Bitcoin players say that virtual currencies are slowly gaining traction. They say that Bitcooin has the potential to become the Internet for money that could smooth the electronic movement of money. In fact, just last week, Bank of America laid its potential by releasing a research note, which is the first of its kind.
Technology insiders like Dixson are excited about these prospects. "We aren't thinking that Amazon is going to be using Bitcoin tomorrow, but I think they will be in five years," he told The New York Times. "It's one of the five best computer science ideas of the last 40 years."
Bitcoin was created in 2009 by anonymous programmers. It is a digital currency network users produced and used to compete against one another to solve computer problems known as "mining." Initially, the programmers thought that only 21 million coins will ever be created. Now, with a speculative boom in Bitcoins, one coin is priced at $1,000 from $200 at the start of last month.
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