Lightyear, the commercial arm of the Stellar Development Foundation, has bought a San Francisco-based startup called Chain. The Lightyear and Chain names will now to be rebranded as a new entity to be known as Interstellar.
According to the company’s blog post, Stellar’s founder, Jed McCaleb, will serve as Chief Technology Officer and will continue to pursue enterprise adoption of blockchain technology in the finance sector.
STELLAR’S GROWTH CONTINUES
Chain, who have delivered fintech solutions for the likes of Visa and Nasdaq, has previously attracted over $40 million in funding from a range of backers including Capital One and Citigroup.
Speaking on the development, Jed McCaleb said the acquisition will help enable organisations to build on the Stellar platform and “Chain’s team has led the market for enterprise adoption of blockchain technology, which is a critical component of building a future where money and digital assets move over open protocols.”
Part of this future will likely include Sequence, Chain’s cloud solution, which allows companies to observe and record assets being transacted between the Stellar network and private ledgers.
Interstellar’s product portfolio will also include StellarX, a marketplace for trading assets on Stellar which is currently in beta and will be launching to the public soon.
The news comes at a time when blockchain adoption rate statistics indicate that Stellar now occupies the number two position as platform of choice for ICOs with RainCheck, an online-to-offline loyalty platform and the latest ICO to launch on Stellar, now believed to be the 50th such Stellar-based project announced in 2018.
While much of the attraction of Stellar is reported to be its ability to handle micro-transactions, the merger with Chain serves as an example of the wider considerations that appear to be underpinning Stellar’s growing success.
