Gabriel Abed (FP)

Bitt Digital Inc., a Barbados based company established to facilitate transactions involving digital currencies, has secured $3 million in capital to develop and expand its trading platform.

And the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Gabriel Abed is confident the new Bitt Exchange is “a cornerstone project for digital finance in the Caribbean”.

“By facilitating trade between traditional and digital currency markets, Bitt is creating the platform for very low cost international commerce and remittance between the people who need it most – the millions of unbanked and under-banked citizens in the Caribbean,” said the entrepreneur, who founded Bitt with partner and the company’s chief financial officer Oliver Gale.

Last week Bitt announced that it had closed a landmark $3 million “seed round” of investment from Avatar Capital, a Caribbean investment group based in Trinidad and Tobago. It said the investment would allow it to “continue to develop and expand” its core services.

Commenting on the effort, Avatar director Peter George said: “Avatar backs Bitt with full confidence. We are pleased to invest in the development of the cryptocurrency industry in the region.

“It is our hope that this investment benefits the people of the Caribbean and becomes the catalyst for digital currency trading in this part of the world.”

Bitt officials said their exchange was powered by AlphaPoint, a platform that “serves as the backbone of exchanges including Bitfinex [and] Cointrader.net”, and “currently supports trading in 11 major fiat currencies, including the United States dollar, British pound, Canadian dollar, Euro, and Barbadian dollar”.

“We were very excited to be selected by Bitt to power their exchange and support their vision of lowering costs for payments and remittances. By connecting their platform to global exchanges, Bitt can offer Caribbean residents competitive exchange rates and deep liquidity from around the world,” AlphaPoint CEO Vadim Telyatnikov said in a comment in the investment announcement.

“With a team of financial experts, IT network security engineers, cryptographers, and software developers from around the world, as well as banking facilities and asset liquidity spanning major international fiat currencies, Bitt is poised to become the leading digital currency exchange in the Caribbean region,” Gale asserted.