Bitcoin and Lightning infrastructure company Voltage has raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by early-stage venture capital firm Trammell Venture Partners, the company said in a statement sent to Bitcoin Magazine.
Craft Ventures, GV, Stillmark, Cavalry Asset Management, Strategic Cyber Ventures, Fulgur Ventures, and Tenzing.vc also participated in the round.
“At Voltage, we are building the tools and services needed to take Bitcoin into its next phase of adoption,” Voltage CEO Graham Krizek said in a statement. “By creating a simple and easy way to interface with Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, we are ushering in a new wave of users and use-cases. We are grateful for the community’s support and will continue our mission to provide easy, scalable solutions to fast-track a Bitcoin standard.”
Voltage said the round would support its growth plans and aid in its hiring efforts as it works to expand and improve its enterprise-grade Bitcoin and Lightning infrastructure solutions.
Voltage provides hosting services for users interested in running a Bitcoin or Lightning node on the cloud. The service also includes a dashboard through which users can interact with their instances, though most of the housekeeping is automatically provided by the infrastructure company. According to its website, sensitive files are encrypted to the user’s password on the client-side and the seed and password created by the user are never seen by Voltage.
“As more developers and companies move to adopt and deploy Bitcoin and Lightning applications at scale, Graham and his team are poised to support rapid, consumer-grade Bitcoin-native development and deployment,” said Trammell Venture Partners’ managing director, Christopher Calicott, who will be joining Voltage’s board of directors.
True ownership of bitcoin can only be achieved by running a node, as the user becomes a participant in the peer-to-peer monetary network. By simply using a mobile or desktop wallet, the user would be trusting somebody else’s node to acknowledge and broadcast transactions.
Voltage’s product line increases the appeal for more people to run their own nodes as it offers a more convenient avenue for beginners or companies in need of easier scaling mechanisms. However, the practice still comes with tradeoffs as the user or company would be outsourcing some aspects of the task to a third party.
