Today San Francisco based Chain confirmed that Lightyear acquired it. Lightyear was formed by the Stellar Foundation, the payments protocol founded by Jed McCaleb who previously was CTO at Ripple. IBM recently announced its
World Wire cross-border platform based on Stellar. Three months ago Fortune first reported
rumors of a $500m Chain.com acquisition. The buying price has not been revealed, but according to
Reuters, Chain CEO Adam Ludwin said: “The deal turned out to be a very good outcome for our investors.”
Chain is one of
several startups that focus on the financial services industry. The company raised more than $40 million from Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures, Capital One, Citigroup, Fiserv, Nasdaq, Orange, and Visa.
The Stellar Foundation which controls Stellar’s substantial funds (market capitalization $3.6 billion) last year set up a for-profit entity Lightyear to work on partnerships. This is the vehicle for the acquisition, and it will be renamed to InterStellar.
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