The Co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, is backing a startup that aims to solve multiple cryptocurrency trading issues. Peter Thiel is a billionaire famous for co-founding PayPal and the Founders Fund. The Founders Fund has invested in many ground-breaking companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Therefore, the fund has a lot of weight in investment circles.
On top of this, Thiel has publicly spoken in favor of Bitcoin in the past, calling it the ‘online equivalent of gold.’
Unidentified sources told the Wall Street Journal that the Founders Fund has invested in a startup called Tagomi Systems, as Napoleon Ta one of the Fund partners is listed as a Tagomi Director.
Sources claim that Tagomi plans to build solutions to the challenge of connecting all the various cryptocurrency exchanges across the world. Currently, each exchange requires a different account and different exchanges impose different limitations as well as having different rosters of coins. These cause liquidity issues and make it difficult to execute large trades, limiting access for wealthy investors.
Tagomi will mirror the traditional stock market and develop smart order routers that are similar in fashion to the ones used by equities broker-dealers. However, so far there is little information about the startup, apart from the fact that its founder is a former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Tusar.
The reports suggest that Tagomi has raised $15.5 million to date, but it remains unclear how much Founders Fund has invested. Although this isn’t the largest funding round ever, it is an encouraging sign, showing investor’s healthy appetite for blockchain investing. Big names like Founders Fund could be the catalyst to a flood of investment from institutional investors.
For now, we’ll just have to wait and see how this venture turns out.
