Solidus Raises $3 Million in Seed Financing to Tackle Digital Asset Market Manipulation
Business Wire, 25 February 2019
Solidus Labs, provider of a machine learning-powered trade surveillance platform tailored for digital assets, secured a $3 million seed round of financing led by Hanaco Ventures. Additional participants in the round include Global Founders Capital, as well as angel investors and Wall Street veterans David Krell and Norman Sorensen. With the proceeds Solidus’ team of former Goldman Sachs engineers is set to address a major challenge preventing greater institutional and mainstream adoption of digital assets – trade manipulation and market integrity.
Solidus’ web-based platform is already deployed with diverse clients including exchanges, broker-dealers, hedge funds and market makers in Europe, the United States and Israel. The funding round will be used to continue expanding the company’s engineering and machine learning teams, as well as sales, marketing and customer success operations. Solidus is accommodating growing demand from digital asset firms, as those strive to satisfy intensifying regulatory oversight and high compliance standards of traditional financial institutions.
A December study conducted by the Blockchain Transparency Institute estimated that over 80% of top 25 Bitcoin pairs (by volume) listed on CoinMarketCap are driven by manipulation. Similarly, in August, the Blockchain Transparency Institute estimated that approximately $6 billion dollars worth of daily digital asset trading volume is fake.
Accordingly, both regulators and market leaders are seeking effective ways to strengthen market integrity. In November, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton stated the agency wishes to see effective market surveillance solutions to become comfortable approving Bitcoin ETFs. In a recent interview, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, owners of leading exchange Gemini Trust Company, underlined “more market surveillance… against manipulative behavior” as a strategic priority for regulators and therefore the industry at large.
