The tide might have gone out Ordinal Bitcoin, but there is a strong background of investments in Bitcoin-only companies. River, a US-based Bitcoin (BTC) financial services and technology company is the latest to make a splash.
River announced a $35 million Series B equity financing round despite the bear market. Kingsway Capital led the round, with notable contributions including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPalCygni, Goldcrest and Valor Equity Partners.
According to Alex Leishman, CEO of River, the new wave of interest in Bitcoin is "largely driven by commercial and institutional adoption." He added:
"It is not fueled by hype. This year's bank failures and bailouts have been a wake-up call, revealing the cracks in the traditional financial system and reminding us why Bitcoin is so important: it is a sure path to a stronger global economy and transparent". ."
The San Francisco-based company manages one of the larger Bitcoin Lightning Nodes, which enable payments and manage liquidity for bitcoin lightning network.
The River Lightning API allows companies to easily integrate with the Lightning Network. The service has already taken over one of the key players in the Bitcoin payments landscape; El Salvador's Chivo wallet use River for almost instant and almost free Bitcoin payments.
River was an early adopter of the Lightning Network, similar to global crypto exchanges including Bitfinex and Kraken.
In addition, the world's largest exchanges, coin base and Binance may soon adopt Lightning as the world slowly adapts to the low-cost, high-performance payment network. In it Moving forward at the Bitcoin conference In London, River CEO Leishm told Cointelegraph:
"I still think we're too early. Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff going on. We're building this really amazing foundation protocol-wise."
He said it's important to see more people “working backwards from real human problems as well. We need more of that.” In light of the rise in mainchain transaction fees due to the meme coin mania, more and more exchanges and crypto companies may turn to the Lightning Network as a solution.
Related: The state of the Bitcoin Lightning Network in 2023
River joins a growing list of Bitcoin companies raising during the bear market. escrow service provider unchained capital recently raised $60 million, while El Salvador's education program received a deluge of investment from Bitcoin advocates around the world.
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