Ethereum startup Ethcore has raised $750,000 in a preliminary, pre-seed funding round led by Silicon Valley-based Blockchain Capital and Shanghai-based Fenbushi Capital .
Ethcore intends to further pursue the development of the Ethereum blockchain stack and assist partners who wish to innovate using the smart contract platform. The startup was also awarded a grant by the U.K. government’s Innovate UK to create a “next-generation foundational distributed ledger platform for institutional communication, authorisation, and consensus.”
Ethereum has gained momentum in 2016, with the market cap of the Ether cryptocurrency recently topping $1 billion before settling back down around $650 million.
What Is Ethcore?
Ethcore was founded by Ethereum co-founder and former CTO Gavin Wood . Along with Vitalik Buterin , Wood co-designed the Ethereum protocol and took a lead in various parts of the Ethereum ecosystem, including devising the Solidity programming language, refining the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and writing the acclaimed Yellow Paper , the first formal specification of a blockchain protocol.
Wood is joined by several other members of the core Ethereum team. including former head of operations Aeron Buchanan, head of communications Ken Kappler, head of security Jutta Steiner, and core developers Arkadiy Paronyan and Marek Kotewicz. According to Blockchain Capital Managing Partner Brad Stephens , it would be fair to analogize Ethcore as Ethereum’s version of Blockstream , which is a startup focused on developing improvements for the Bitcoin blockchain.
Having said that, there are some differences between their respective business models. Stephens told Bitcoin Magazine : “Ethcore is much more focused on building licensed, proprietary tools for large financial institutions, exchanges, and so forth, as opposed to the more open-sourced, Red Hat approach Blockstream is taking … One of Ethcore’s main value propositions is that they know Ethereum better than anyone, and thus the tools they build and deploy […]
