The Dallas-based firm announced Thursday it had successfully completed a funding round, with participation from Castle Island Ventures, the Tezos Foundation, CoinShares and Digital Currency Group. The round was led by Moonshots Capital, an early-stage investor that has backed the Slack messaging platform in the past.
Crypto software firm Zabo, which claims it can connect bank accounts directly to cryptocurrency wallets, raised $2.5 million to build out its engineering team and add new customers.
Zabo says it can connect bank accounts to crypto wallets using just a few lines of code.
Zabo will use the funding to enhance its engineering capabilities as well as grow its customer base, according to a press release. The company claims its technology is already being used or trialed in a series of applications, including personal finance management tools, decentralized finance platforms and even tax software.
Moonshots Capital general partner Craig Cummings said in a statement that Zabo had «built an incredibly important piece of technical infrastructure that will enable cryptocurrency financial services to touch billions of people.»
Christopher Brown, Zabo’s co-founder, said in a statement the company’s success lies in simplifying the process connecting wallets and banks. Previous attempts to connect cryptocurrencies to traditional finance have been highly technical and complicated.
«Zabo solves this by dramatically reducing the complexity,» he said. «We enable leading financial services companies to swiftly and easily integrate into hundreds of leading cryptocurrency wallets with just a few lines of code.»
Alex Treece, another co-founder and the company’s president, said in a statement the technology could help traditional financial entities interact with cryptocurrencies, which in turn could let these firms «build compelling products … in order to serve this new generation of customers.»
The startup had previously raised a $1 million pre-seed round from Ken Seiff’s Blockchange Ventures in early 2018.
Mt. Gox Deadline Extended Again After Creditors Criticize Refund Proposal
The submission deadline for the Mt. Gox rehabilitation plan has been pushed back again after a draft proposed last week was met with opposition from numerous creditors.In the plan, proposed to Mt. Gox creditors at a March 25 meeting, rehabilitation trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi said he would, if authorized by the court, sell off some of the recovered cryptocurrencies in order to settle prioritized fiat currency claims.
Creditors would have the option of receiving reimbursement in bitcoin (BTC), but the rehabilitation proposal says it was possible there would be an «insufficient amount» to settle all claims. As the trustee has ruled out making any additional purchases of bitcoin, some creditors would likely receive part of their claim in fiat currency, the plan said.
But Kobayashi’s proposal received significant pushback from creditors, not least because most creditors want to be reimbursed in bitcoin.
Alex Ortega, managing principal of Iverson Capital Group, the first company to buy Mt. Gox creditor claims in 2016, told CoinDesk that many creditors were dissatisfied with the rehabilitation plan and felt the trustee should not be allowed to sell recovered bitcoin in order to settle fiat currency claims first.
«Most of these creditors are generally bitcoin specialties themselves who want to remain in the market; so to sell off BTC and pay them in fiat not only locks them into a price at exit and caps their potential upside but also would lead to a sell-off in the market, which, as happened in 2018, can get messy,» Ortega said.
Mt. Gox declared bankruptcy in 2014 after hackers stole 850,000 bitcoins from its servers. What now comprises the Mt. Gox estate was originally 200,000 bitcoins found in an old-format wallet shortly after the exchange collapsed.
Following the meeting, the Tokyo District Court granted a request Friday for a deadline extension from Kobayashi. In a statement Monday, Kobayashi said he needed time to address some «matters that require closer examination.»
The Tokyo District Court had already extended the deadline in October 2019, which pushed the submission date to March 31, 2020.
