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Bitski—an app developer which bills itself as the creator of the first crypto wallet “built for mainstream adoption”—announced yesterday the close of a successful $1.8 million funding round with some big-name support.
The VC arm of Coinbase, Galaxy Digital, Winklevoss Capital, and several other heavy hitters participated in the round, according to the company’s statement. The latest cash injection brings the company’s total funding to $3.5 million.
Donnie Dinch—co-founder and CEO of Bitski—told Decrypt that the company closed its latest round over the summer, but could not go into further detail regarding the raise or related info until the company “locked in a few high-value customers.”
In business since late 2018, Bitski claims that more than 300 applications have been developed on its platform since its launch, and the company plans to use the money it has raised to further expand its growing list of developer tools.
While Bitski calls itself “chain agnostic,” it currently only supports Ethereum developers, though the company says it plans to expand to other protocols. Some of the companies to have made use of Bitski include the Sandbox game franchise, video-streaming network Props, and the new mobile strategy-battle game Clementine.
Bitski’s flagship product, however, is its Bitski User Wallet, which the company says is designed to spur widespread crypto adoption. It features a “unique hardware-secured private key storage solution and single-sign-on wallet,” which the company says makes it easier for users to access their funds.
Wallets are stored on hardware devices known as hardware security modules (HSMs), which are then placed in what the company’s website refers to as “biometrically secure data centers” to ensure hackers and other malicious actors have as hard of a time as possible getting their fingers on funds that don’t belong to them.
The wallet, though, isn’t the company’s primary focus, Dinch said, adding that the company isn’t sharing usage numbers at this time. “We’re primarily a developer services business. Our first ‘developer service’ just happens to have a user-facing front end (Bitski User Wallet),” said Dinch. “We’re more focused on building strong partnerships with great developers and building out tools to help them gain mass adoption in their products.”
The idea, Dinch explained, is to create a secure, digital wallet infrastructure that could support developers and their users “at mass market scale.”