In portuguese crypto world , there's not a lot or references known to the general public . It's common to focus abroad and in personalities as Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin .
Fortunately, this paradigm seems to be changing.
Diogo Monica, PhD in Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon and co-founder of Anchorage, is the 53rd most influential person in the world of cryptography in 2021. The ranking is prepared by Modern Consensus, a platform dedicated to cryptography and blockchain.
After becoming a master's degree in Communication and Information Network Engineering, Diogo left for the United States, precisely for the silicon valley technology hub. In 2011, it had its first major challenge at Square ($SQ), a payment software and hardware marketing company, aimed at small businesses.
He started out as a security designer, but quickly became the leader of this team and met Nathan McCauley, a partner in the later creation of Anchorage.
In 2015, he was a speaker at the Web Summit as head of security for Docker, a company whose product is based on an open platform for application development.
In 2017, the biggest challenge of Diogo Monica's life finally comes up, the partnership with former colleague Nathan McCauley, which would result in Anchorage, the fintech that serves as the gateway for banks to enter the world of cryptocurrencies. It should be stressed that this company was the first federally regulated financial institution in the United States to this end.
The approval in January is one of the main reasons for Diogo's position in the ranking, being classified as a "huge step forward for the entire crypto currency industry".
In essence, the bank acts as an intermediary in the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies, offers booking services of this type of currency and allows to open term deposit accounts, with a very interesting return on investment in Bitcoin ($BTC).
Since the beginning of the year, it has gone through the three investment series (A, B and C). It managed to raise US$57 million in the first two series, which consist of raising initial financial resources to increase its capacity to expand in the market, as well as process improvement and optimization. In the third series, which aims at accelerating the company and is generally associated with an international expansion, it has achieved about 80 million. The company will use this money for an expansion in national territory, starting with the opening of offices in Lisbon.
It should be noted that in January of this year, in partnership with Visa ($V), Anchorage launched a pilot project, Crypto APIs. Its functionality is to integrate cryptocurrencies and other digital assets into the services of storage, acquisition and sale of digital goods of banks. This service will be available in the Visa network range until the end of 2021.
Fintech trades about $100 billion annually and employs 75 workers, 15 in the Port division dedicated to engineering, and the remaining 60 split between South Dakota (where the official office is), San Francisco and New York.
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