The interoperable cryptocurrency wallets at Dapix Inc. just got a little fatter.
Dapix, the company behind the Foundation for Interwallet Operability (FIO) protocol, today announced that it has raised $5.7 million in Series A funding round led by Binance Labs, the venture arm of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume. Other investors include Blockwall Capital, NGC Ventures, and LuneX Ventures.
The money will allow Dapix launch its FIO mainnet sooner than expected, now targeting Q1 2020, and build new products and features that will be available to FIO members, according to the company.
The Foundation for Interwallet Operability now consists of 25 crypto wallet providers, exchanges and other crypto-focused ventures, Dapix CEO and cofounder David Gold told Decrypt.
“The FIO Protocol will be the industry standard usability layer for the entire blockchain ecosystem,” he said. Several notable companies within the crypto industry are already FIO members, including Erik Voorhees’s crypto exchange ShapeShift, Roger Ver’s Bitcoin.com, Mycelium, MyCrypto, and Binance’s Trust Wallet.
The idea is for the FIO protocol to improve “usability across every blockchain, token or coin” through a common decentralized layer that seeks to eliminate many of the risks associated with sending and receiving digital assets. For example, the protocol aims to enhance blockchain security by eliminating the need “for users to know or see” a public blockchain address, according to Gold.
“It will enable critically needed decentralized payment requests as well as providing metadata such as a note, invoice or order cart along with every transaction on every other blockchain,” he said.
Gold said he launched Dapix in mid-2018 after he realized that while crypto wallets have great potential, they are difficult and risky to use. Something needed to be done if digital wallets were to move beyond the limitations of their respective blockchains, he said.
“I began to think about how to fix this in a way that would be fully decentralized and no less private than the underlying blockchains, and in a way that it could gain traction and support in the marketplace,” Gold said. “We began to put details into the idea and get input from knowledgeable people we trusted. Some of those people were executives who jumped on board to back what we were doing when it was just an idea in a document outlining the roadmap.”
And while it may sound audacious, Gold believes that in a few years, no one will build a crypto-based product without FIO protocol integration. He points to the growing list of impressive FIO members as evidence, including the fact that many of them have already begun integrating the protocol “before mainnet is even launched,” he said.
Despite the fact that Dapix, a VC-backed company, is currently responsible for building the FIO protocol, Gold insists that its a “community-driven project.”
Said Gold: “The FIO Protocol will be open-sourced prior to mainnet when it is given to the community.”