A host of Wall Street heavyweights, including former Nyse Euronext CEO Duncan Niederauer, have joined a $1.25 million seed funding round for Symbiont, a startup using the blockchain for "smart securities".
Niederauer was joined by former co-head of trading at Citadel Matt Andresen, Getco founders Dan Tierney and Stephen Schuler, Allied World Assurance Company CEO Scott Carmilani, and Celeridem FinTech Fund. A Series A round of institutional investment is expected to close in the third quarter.
Symbiont says it is hoping to tap the speed and security of cryptographic distributed ledgers to enable faster markets that are more efficient, and have lower costs with increased liquidity, transparency, and security.
The promise is that by making programmable versions of traditional securities available on a distributed ledger, the platform will allow institutional and retail users to issue, trade and process instruments more efficiently in a single, global, decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer financial network.
The startup was created earlier this year by the founders of MathMoney f(x), a firm building infrastructure to support the "math-based currency ecosystem", and Counterparty, a platform for financial tools on the Bitcoin network.
"Symbiont is bridging the gap between Wall Street and the emerging blockchain ecosystem. It's an exciting, timely and much-needed development for the long-term health of the markets," says Niederauer, who is joining the Symbiont board.