Stellar Development Foundation joins SatoshiPay as strategic investor
We are excited to announce a new chapter in our partnership with San Francisco-based Stellar Development Foundation (SDF): A strategic investment of $550k by SDF’s Enterprise Fund, supporting our future growth and product development. Also read SDF’s press release.
A long-term partnership
Starting with our first contact with SDF in 2017, we began working together to grow the ecosystem for financial freedom that the Stellar distributed ledger network has become. We’ve seen the number of operations on the network rise from a few per minute to 30 per second, regularly surpassing 3 million operations per day. Back in 2017, there were only a handful of nodes beside the SDF servers. Today, there are over 100 nodes.
In the spirit of the open technology community, we give back generously to the ecosystem that helps us grow. Here are a few of our contributions:
- Network: We are maintaining 3 full history node clusters, Docker images to spin up your own node and a fast history sync script
- User acquisition: We are distributing 50m XLM to consumers via our online publishing clients like Der Aktionär
- Wallet: We’ve released an easy-to-use open-source Stellar wallet app called “Solar” for all major mobile and desktop platforms
- Research: In collaboration with TU Berlin’s Mathematics faculty, we are publishing a series of academic papers on the Stellar Consensus Protocol
- Standardisation: We are participating in working groups for various Stellar Ecosystem Proposals
- Technology: We are working on a payment channel implementation for Stellar and our in-house lightweight Stellar SDK in JavaScript
- Community: We are organising Stellar meetups in Berlin and publish developer blog posts, like How to build a Stellar-powered snack dispenser ;)
The SDF transaction
We fully trust the technology we use every day and like to benefit from its clear advantages over traditional financial infrastructure, including speed and cost. Naturally, the investment amount of $550k was paid in Lumens (XLM), the native currency of the Stellar network. The transaction of 8,204,187 XLM between SDF’s and SatoshiPay’s Stellar accounts took about 5 seconds to complete and cost a total of 0.00006 cents in network fees — truly money that moves like email.
Following our fellow Berliners DSTOQ and Silicon Valley-based Abra, this is the third investment of SDF’s 8 billion XLM Enterprise Fund, which was announced at the Meridian conference in Mexico City last November and aims to supply direct venture-style funding to companies growing the Stellar network.
To receive SDF’s funds we set up a Stellar account that is managed by multiple co-signers — to comply with our company policy requiring us to have the consent of at least two people before funds can be moved. We did this using our Solar wallet software, which ensures that each co-signing person is notified of new outgoing transactions, so they can approve them by using their personal secret access key that is only accessible by them.
Using the tools we’ve built on top of Stellar’s open, inclusive financial ecosystem to serve our daily business needs, gives us a glance of a financial future that is fully decentralised. We are glad to be pioneering this future.
Instant B2B money transfers
Just as SDF moved funds to SatoshiPay within seconds, we want to open up instant, transparent and low-fee money transfers to businesses and non-profits globally. Therefore we are building our new SatoshiPay B2B service based on our existing Stellar technology stack, and SDF’s support is helping us greatly with this mission.
Check out our B2B website and make sure to register your interest in the service, so we can let you know once it’s live. We also came up with a really cool name (we think!) for the new service, which we will reveal shortly. So, stay tuned!
Follow us on Twitter @SatoshiPay, to get our latest updates within seconds. :)
The SatoshiPay team
