$500k in funding paves way for bitcoin trading

New York City-based bitcoin startup Coinsetter has taken its first outside investment by closing a seed round of funding totaling $500,000.

The round was led by Barry Silbert, the CEO and founder of SecondMarket, and tech entrepreneur Jimmy Furland. Silbert invested in the company through his Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. Tribeca Venture Partners, a venture capital firm, also took a leading role as the largest investor in the round. Other investors include Microsoft head of corporate strategy Charles Songhurst, Facebook product lead Ben Davenport and bitcoin industry leader Roger Ver.

"This financing round places our company in a position to build this highly demanded platform the right way," said Jaron Lukasiewicz, Coinsetter's founder and CEO. "We now have multiple developers working to bring a high-quality product to market, and we have even more people performing security-intensive code reviews on it."

Coinsetter will soon be launching a forex trading platform for bitcoin that will let people make levered trades on margin and short the bitcoin market.

These capabilities are available in all mature markets but are virtually absent in the bitcoin space, Coinsetter noted in a blog post. The startup also plans to offer the first scalable solution for accredited investors and institutions to earn interest on their bitcoins.