The new director will also assess risks related to the companies in PayPal’s blockchain-related portfolio and “lead external partner diligence meetings related to blockchain opportunities and potential.” The successful candidate will need to be a compliance professional with no less than 10 years of experience.
Payment giant PayPal is seeking a blockchain expert to help identify use cases for the tech in the prevention of financial crimes.
According to a job opening posted late last month, the firm wants to hire a director of AML and blockchain strategy. The new staffer at PayPal’s New York City office would be responsible for “evaluating blockchain use cases with an eye towards financial crimes risk management and overseeing AML investigative activities and emerging trends in this space”, the ad states.
PayPal has already been expressing interest in blockchain-based compliance initiatives. Last April, it invested in Cambridge Blockchain, a startup using distributed ledger for managing sensitive data. PayPal chose to invest in Cambridge Blockchain “because it is applying blockchain for digital identity in a way that we believe could benefit financial services companies including PayPal”, a company spokesperson told CoinDesk at the time.
Late last year, it also joined a funding round for crypto banking compliance startup Initialized Capital. The payments giant had been an early member of the Libra Association but later withdrew its support from Facebook’s crypto initiative.
PayPal has been actively researching blockchain technology. Last year, it won a patent for a tool detecting crypto-extorting ransomware and mitigating its damage. The company has been also looking into ways to make crypto payments faster.
The payments firm has been watching the crypto industry closely for years, launching an option for merchants to accept bitcoin as early as 2014. It also added Wences Casares, CEO of Xapo and the early bitcoin advocate, to it board of directors in 2016. However, the company has been publicly maintaining a “blockchain, not bitcoin” stance towards the technology.
PeerNova Validates Shift to Enterprise Blockchain with $31 Million Funding
Blockchain startup PeerNova has received $31 million in a Series B round, bringing the company’s total fundraising to $74 million.
Mosaik Partners led the latest investment, joined by Intuitive Venture Partners and Medici Ventures, the investing arm of retail giant Overstock, the company said.
PeerNova declined to disclose any further financial details of the deal.
The sizable funding validates the one-time bitcoin mining company’s shift to the enterprise blockchain designed to improve data reporting processes for financial services companies,
“It has been much harder for blocking companies in the last 12 months to go raise capital”, PeerNova’s CEO Gangesh Ganesan told CoinDesk. “The fact that we raised a big around is an indication of investors’ confidence in our model.”
In addition to new hires for its U.S. and London operations, the company has been negotiating with local financial authorities to open an office in Singapore as many of its clients have businesses in Asia, Ganesan said.
San Jose-based PeerNova started life as a bitcoin mining company through a merger in 2014 between cloud mining firm CloudHashing and enterprise hardware designer HighBitcoin.
The company shifted its focus from mining infrastructure services to enterprise blockchain software with a $8.6 million Series A funding later in the same year. Mosaik Partners, Former AOL CEO Steve Case and Crypto Currency Partners invested in this round.
The company uses proprietary blockchain technology to reduce reporting inefficiencies by replacing traditional auditors with cryptography.
Unlike most peer blockchain solutions, PeerNova’s product Cuneiform does not have a distributed ledger, as it only provides a reference point for a client to streamline the querying of their databases, creating cryptographic evidence of events.
The company helped financial services giant State Street with sorting tax liabilities for hedge funds by using the blockchain system to track their investments and reinvestments over multiple years.
PeerNova further developed its enterprise blockchain business with $5 million through the second tranche of the Series A financing in March 2016. The funding was also Overstock’s first investment in the bitcoin industry.
In November 2016, Chinese conglomerate Zhejiang Zhongnan Holdings Group acquired five percent of PeerNova for $4 million.
