One of the most potentially impactful acquisitions in the blockchain and cryptocurrency market has materialized this week. The Chain platform, which is backed by investments made by prominent financial entities such as Visa and Nasdaq, has been bought by a Stellar startup. Chain is one of the field leaders when it comes to crypto entrepreneurship, and Lightyear supports global partner activities for the Stellar network, which is one of the biggest free and open-source financial protocol available to connect financial systems. The acquisition of Chain by the Stellar-powered Lightyear.io was announced on Monday. The platform is known for raising north of $40 million from Visa, Nasdaq, and other top financial companies.
The Interstellar Project Sees the Light
As a result of the merge, the Interstellar entity is officially born. Former RRE Ventures partner and Chain CEO Adam Ludwin, will be the leader of the new venture as a CEO. The well-known Jed McCaleb, father of the Ripple and Stellar protocols, will be the CTO. All the current Chain employees will be retained. Several investors joined forces to close the deal that has been rumored to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million, which would make the acquisition one of the biggest of 2018.
Despite Chain’s focus on private blockchains, Ludwin has stated that Lightyear will stay its course. As Ludwin told CoinDesk, Lightyear needs a chain that everyone can access. He said that people at Chain viewed favorably Stellar’s ability to create platforms that could master the craft of asset issuance.
McCaleb, meanwhile, headlined a reciprocal situation: Stellar’s coders wanted to link with entities and institutions that served as an aid to commercialize their work. Therefore, a win-win situation panned out.
A Software Solution
Crypto investors, however, should note that interstellar does not intend to have any influence on the Stellar-powered token XLM. According to Ludwin, the new initiative exists to be used as a software solution.
The merging process was a long one. The preliminary conversations started back in early 2018, so we are talking about months of disagreements, talks, and back-and-forth discussions. However, the final result was satisfactory for everyone involved.
Interstellar provides a software solution that plans on serving as the setting of a symbiotic relationship, with Chain helping Lightyear improving its shortcomings and limitations and vice versa.
Ludwin also made clear that the Interstellar project was nothing like one of McCaleb’s “babies,” Ripple. The new venture’s primary goal is to work together with the Stellar Development Foundation to adapt the software to be used by for-profit startups and enterprises.
Ludwin said that while Ripple focuses its efforts to power international B2B (Business to Business) networks, Stellar can issue tokens of all kinds. However, and similar to Ripple, Interstellar will keep bringing open-source software to the companies already associated with Chain. The venture will maintain its use of the Sequence service.
A Little Bit More about Stellar
One of the fastest-growing networks of 2018, Stellar is a platform that connects banks, payments systems, and people in one efficient system. It fosters the perfect environment to move money quickly, reliably, and with little costs involved.
The platform assists low-cost payments between different currencies, with transactions on the decentralized Stellar network being solved in 2-5 seconds.
By Andrés Chavéz
