10 VC firms betting big on bitcoin and the blockchain. Excluding private deals, nearly 200 venture capital firms have invested in bitcoin companies, and CoinDesk has a listed IDG Capital Partners, AME Cloud Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners as among the top 10 VCs you need to pay attention to in the bitcoin sector.
Building the trust engine. UBS’s new whitepaper outlines what blockchain has the potential to do for banks and businesses and holds the technology up as a possible means to improve the financial system. “We have begun also to see a clear outline of what a block-chain enabled financial system might look like.”
Blockchain-based banking backend Vault OS from Googler emerges from stealth mode. ThoughtMachine, a company founded by ex-Google engineer Paul Taylor, aims to change the traditional banking model with a modern, fully integrated, blockchain-based banking operating system called Vault OS. But the operating system leaves many questions unanswered. “Each instance of the OS will run its own private blockchain and cryptographic ledger, hosted as a service by ThoughtMachine. Of course, whether banks will be willing to essentially permanently outsource their most fundamental operations is yet another big question,” writes Devin Coldewey for Techcrunch.