NEW YORK, June 9 (Reuters) - Symbiont, a U.S.-based company that uses so-called blockchain technology, has raised $1.25 million in funding from prominent U.S. financial professionals, the company said on Tuesday.
The blockchain is bitcoin’s main technological innovation, allowing users make to make instant, anonymous payments, and without government regulation.
Early investors in Symbiont include Duncan Niederauer, former chief executive of NYSE Euronext Inc, and Matt Andresen, former trading head at hedge fund Citadel and now co-chief executive officer of Headlands Technologies.
Dan Tierney and Stephen Schuler, founders of a high-frequency trading firm formerly known as Getco, have invested as well through Wicklow Capital, the company said. The other investors were Scott Carmilani, the chairman and chief executive officer of Allied World Assurance Company, and Celeridem FinTech Fund.
A “Series A” round of institutional investment is expected to close in the third quarter, Symbiont said.
Symbiont said it has developed “Smart Securities” technology which aims to improve the way the issuance, trading and settlement of securities takes place in the capital markets.
Mark Smith, chief executive and co-founder of Symbiont, emphasized that the company does not run an exchange.
“Our focus is not trading digital currencies. Our focus is the application of the blockchain or distributed ledger technology in conjunction with smart contracts for the issuance, management, trading, clearing, and settlement of different traditional financial securities.”
By making programmable versions of traditional securities available on a distributed ledger, Symbiont said the platform will allow institutional and retail users to issue, trade and process a range of instruments more efficiently in a single, global, decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer financial network.” (Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.