Ethcore has raised $750,000 during preliminary seed funding. The platform is the first Ethereum-based startup to attract venture investing.

The funding was provided by two venture capital funds, Silicon Valley-based Blockchain Capital and Shanghai-based Fenbushi Capital. Ethcore works on developing solutions aimed to resolve such problems of Ethereum and other blockchain systems as privacy and scalability. Projects are claimed to be implemented during the upcoming year.

The main client developed by Ethcore is named Parity. It is a next-generation platform based on the principle of distributed ledger and is developed for institutional communication, authorisation and consensus.

Ethcore has much in common with the activities of bitcoin company Blockstream. Both are focused on improvement solutions for blockchains. But there is also a basic difference emphasised by the Blockchain Capital Managing Partner Brad Stephens. As he told Bitcoin Magazine, “Ethcore is much more focused on building licensed, proprietary tools for large financial institutions, exchanges, and so forth, as opposed to the more open-sourced, Red Hat approach Blockstream is taking.”

Another principal difference is, obviously, the choice of the target cryptocurrency platform:

“One of Ethcore’s main value propositions is that they know Ethereum better than anyone, and thus the tools they build and deploy should buttress and catalyze Ethereum as a whole.”

Aside from the creation of licensed instruments, Ethcore will also help the Ethereum community with the development of various open-source projects.

“We're excited to see the progress that Ethcore is making on bringing Ethereum technology to the next level through their full implementation of the Ethereum protocol in Parity,” said Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation board member, who is also a partner at Fenbushi Capital, one of the two venture capital funds which have provided investment for Ethcore.

Ethcore was established by Ethereum co-founder and former technical director Gavin Wood, who, together with Vitalik Buterin, was involved in the development of various parts of the Ethereum ecosystem including its programming language Solidity. Later Wood established Ethcore together with other Ethereum core developers Aeron Buchanan, Ken Kappler, Jutta Steiner, Arkadiy Paronyan and Marek Kotewicz.

Elena Platonova