State-Owned French Bank Joins Bitcoin Startup's $8 Million Series A

Veronique Jacq of the partially state-owned French investment bank Bpifrance told CoinDesk bitcoin is becoming a staple of the global economy.

The lightning-focused startup ACINQ raised an $8 million Series A led by Idinvest Partners, with the participation of Serena and Bpifrance.

"If lightning lives up to its promise, it's going to relay a lot of transactions," Debock said.

"The lightning network will be where high volumes of transactions could develop in the future, so we wanted to be there, with the infrastructure that will enable these transactions," she said.

Stepping back, ACINQ has long been the quietest pillar of the lightning startup trinity, with much of the community development spearheaded by Lightning Labs and Blockstream, both in Silicon Valley.

ACINQ has its own lightning implementation, Eclair, in addition to the Eclair mobile wallet, and Strike, an application program interface for lightning, which Padiou compared to the merchant payment processing provider Stripe.

To date, ACINQ operates the largest capacity lightning node on the network, supporting over 1,000 channels.

As for ACINQ, Padiou said his startup is focused on mobile devices and payments.

Idinvest's Debock said institutions can view lightning as a "Broader application" of bitcoin's potential, a space ripe for more traditional equity deals.

Although Teinturier expressed gratitude for the public outreach done by the teams at Blockstream and Lightning Labs - like running community Slack channels, live demonstrations and conferences - his smaller team prefers to minimize its media exposure for the near future.