River Raises $35 Million, Led By Peter Thiel Targets Lightning Network

Summary:
• River intends to expand its Lighting Network capabilities to cater for the growing demand for lightning network transactions

Bitcoin technology and financial services firm River has just announced that it closed a $35 million raise in a funding round. Kingsway Capital was the driving force behind this series B funding. Peter Thiel, Goldcrest, Cygni, M13, Valour Equity Partners, Esas Ventures, and Alarko Ventures were among the other investors. A portion of the proceeds from this round will be put towards expanding the B2B River Lightning market.

River and the emergence of Bitcoin as an alternative to banks

Founded in 2019, River is a company that provides a variety of Bitcoin services, such as Bitcoin brokerage with zero-fee recurring orders, full-reserve custody, mining, and a Bitcoin wallet that enables on-chain and Lightning Network transactions. River is also a frontrunner in the Lightning infrastructure space, facilitating Lightning transactions across the crypto ecosystem’s most prominent exchanges and wallets. The company asserts that it has complete Bitcoin custody and will keep working to bring about a better economic future driven by Bitcoin.

River launched River Lightning, an enterprise application programming interface (API) that facilitates Lightning Network integration, last year. Several cryptocurrency apps currently use River Lightning to facilitate instant Bitcoin payments. One of the most prominent uses of the network is Chivo wallet of El Salvador, which uses River Lightning to process Lightning payments.

Rising on-chain fees have contributed to an increase in demand for Lightning transactions, prompting River to develop its B2B River Lightning service. River plans to be the industry’s Bitcoin payments back-end in addition to servicing people and businesses directly. River says that its mission is to make it easy for regular people looking for a new financial system to get started with Bitcoin investment.

 In the face of failing banks in the mainstream financial sector, many investors are looking at Bitcoin as a suitable and trustworthy alternative store of value. Therefore, it makes sense that River is looking to leverage this promising prospect.