Coinsetter, a US-based foreign exchange trading service for virtual currency Bitcoin, has raised $500,000 in its seed round led by Barry Silbert, the chief executive and founder of private deals platform SecondMarket, through his Bitcoin Opportunity Fund.
The other investors included venture capital firm Tribeca Venture Partners – the largest investor in the round – and angel investors Jimmy Furland, software provider Microsoft’s head of corporate strategy Charles Songhurst, Facebook product lead Ben Davenport, and Roger Ver, who had previously invested $120,000 in BitInstant.
Coinsetter said it would “soon be launching a levered forex trading platform for Bitcoin that enables people to make levered trades on margin and short the Bitcoin market. In an ancillary arm, Coinsetter will also offer the first scalable solution for accredited investors and institutions to earn interest on their Bitcoins.”
Separately, OpenCoin has closed an angel round of funding from Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, FF Angel IV, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Vast Ventures.
Previously, Coinbase, a digital wallet for Bitcoin transactions, had raised $600,000 from accelerator Y Combinator and publisher International Data Group’s corporate venturing unit IDG Ventures.
Bitcoin was set up without central bank backing but with a predetermined limit of 21 million available to be issued from its software and has seen fluctuations in its value from $9 in January to $200 on 9 April 2013 and back down to $150 a day later.