Chain

Chain is a cloud blockchain infrastructure solution that enables organizations to build better financial services from the ground up. Founded in 2014, Chain has raised over $40 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Pantera Capital, Capital One, Citigroup, Fiserv, Nasdaq, Orange, and Visa.

Chain has previously partnered and worked to build blockchain networks for Visa, Nasdaq, State Street, Citibank, and more. Adam Ludwin was the founder of Chain. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Ludwin began his career as a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group and then worked in the venture capital space, specializing in “Fintech” organizations at RRE Ventures. He was credited with investments in prominent companies, including Vine, Slack, Kik, and Paperless Post.

In 2018, Chain was acquired by Lightyear Corp., the commercial arm of the Stellar Development Foundation, the organization behind the Lumens cryptocurrency, which formed Interstellar. The acquisition price was not disclosed, but Forbes claimed it was the equivalent of $500 million paid in Lumens. In 2020, Chain was re-acquired to continue its mission to build a more robust global financial system through blockchain cloud technology. Chain is now a privately held corporation with a newly established board of directors, officers, and shareholders.

Mission: Accelerate the World’s Transition to Cryptocurrency. Accelerating the growth of adopting cryptocurrency can help people globally: Control their money – ability to access their funds anytime and anywhere; Safeguard their data -cryptography-secured blockchain makes data tempering highly unlikely; Protect their identity – no central entity can compromise your identity.

To tackle the challenges above; they offer products along four verticals:

1. Payment
2. Trading
3. Financial Services
4. Metaverse

Their strategy is to leverage payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition while building trading and financial services solutions as the primary sources of revenue. Chainʼs Web3 strategy is designed to unlock the capabilities of public blockchain networks and smart contracts at the infrastructure level through Chain Cloud. This capability empowers developers to focus on their applications and users, dedicating fewer resources to maintain the nodes running their applications.