Bitcoin Daily: Blockchain Startup Clear Wants To Work With Telcos; Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Against Kraken, Bitmain

Clear, a startup that wants to build blockchain for huge-volume transaction systems like telecommunications companies, has announced a $13 million Series A funding round, according to reports. The funding round was spearheaded by Eight Roads, with participation from Telefónica Innovation Ventures, Deutsche Telekom’s Telekom Innovation Pool, HKT and Singtel Innov8.

Payments between worldwide telecommunications companies are largely a manual process, as well as error-prone. Clear Co-founder Gal Hochberg said he wants to transform commercial contracts into digital smart contracts. 

“What that lets us do is create a trusted view of the true status of the relationship within the company’s business partners, because they’re now looking at the same pricing and usage. They can find any issues in real time, either in commercial information or in service delivery, and they can even actually resolve those inside our platform,” Hochberg said.

In other news, Lightning Labs has raised $10 million in Series A funding in a bid to be known as the “Visa” of bitcoin, according to CoinDesk. The company is looking to launch its first paid offering for businesses that want to let people pay with bitcoin.

The amount of funding illustrates the possibility that some in the industry see the startup as a potential future player, and think it has a good business model. Craft Ventures led the funding round, and Managing Director Brian Murray joined Lightning Labs’ board of directors.

“If bitcoin is going to reach its potential as a viable global currency, it’s going to need to scale beyond the base layer,” Murray said. “Similar to how Visa relieves banks from handling all fiat currency traffic, Lightning relieves the base bitcoin chain from [handling] all transactions, thus [bringing] more speed and fee efficiency to the network.”

A judge has dismissed a lawsuit, which said that Bitmain and its co-founder Jihan Wu, Kraken and its co-founder Jesse Powell, and Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver manipulated the price of bitcoin during a hard fork in 2018. CoinDesk reported that the fork created bitcoin SV, and that blockchain development company United American Corp accused the defendants of “hijacking” bitcoin cash.

United Corp President and CEO Benoit Laliberté said the lawsuit decision illustrated that the judge “recognized the importance of establishing law in what has been, to date, a fairly undefined environment.”