Bitcoin lending platform Bitbond has secured €200,000 (=$268,000) in seed funding, arranged by venture capital firm Point Nine Capital.
Bitbond lenders earn interest on their bitcoins, loaned to regular borrowers or to fund bitcoin projects. Borrowers needed to supply financial information in order to determine their creditworthiness. If rejected, they can also post a load request.
The service is effectively a p2p lending platform, not a bank or a lender on its own. Lenders can therefore earn more interest than they would through traditional means, and borrowers gain access to capital which they may have otherwise not enjoyed. Since launch just over one year ago, it has reportedly facilitated almost 200 loans in over 100 countries.
Despite the setbacks faced by Bitcoin in its evolution, co-founder and CEO Radoslav Albrecht remains optimistic:
“There was huge disruption and of course people did lose money, but it is over, and contrary to what many people thought at the time, it has not deterred businesses from using bitcoin. When I look at our user sign-ups, they didn’t decline after the Mt. Gox crisis, they actually went up. We see the overall trend as more people getting engaged with bitcoin.”
Mainstream engagement will be key, as the bitcoin lending industry had previously developed a bit of a stigma for facilitating Ponzi schemes. The more it's adopted, the harder it will be to keep such schemes out of the public eye.
