Wall Street giant Cantor Fitzgerald is helping bitcoin sidechain and open-source decentralized network VerifiedX with a $15 million financing round.
VerifiedX said Wednesday that its foundation had raised the cash to expand custody relationships with NYSE-listed custodian BitGo, and to get vBTC, its wrapped token product, on centralized exchanges.
Financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, one of Wall Street’s early Bitcoin supporters, is VerifiedX’s banking partner on the round.
Wrapped tokens like VerifiedX’s vBTC represent bitcoin and allow traders and investors to use their bitcoin holdings across other crypto platforms and applications that aren’t natively compatible with the Bitcoin network.
Typically with wrapped tokens, a holder sends Bitcoin to a custodian, or to a small group of signers acting together, and receives an off-chain representation on another network in exchange. The representation trades and settles freely, but it is only as sound as the entity holding the Bitcoin behind it.
But with VerifiedX’s product, when a holder creates a vBTC token, the network generates a unique native Bitcoin address inside the token itself, and the holder deposits Bitcoin to that self-custodial address. The coins stay there, visible on Bitcoin’s own ledger, and never leave the Bitcoin ecosystem.
“Nearly every way to put Bitcoin to work on-chain today asks the holder to swap it for someone else’s IOU,” Brian May, a member of the VerifiedX Foundation, said in a statement.
“It’s the reason less than 1% of all Bitcoin held by institutions is earning any yield. vBTC is a game-changer in that regard, and this round funds the custody, exchange and lending rails that will allow institutions to use vBTC and natively turn their Bitcoin into productive financial capital.”
The announcement did not reveal who had taken part in the funding round.
VerifiedX is a financial operating system for Bitcoin, and offers a number of products enabling self-custodial ownership, instant settlement, programmable finance and native Bitcoin utility.
Financial services firm Cantor was among the early Wall Street supporters of Bitcoin. The firm helps custody the Treasury reserves for stablecoin giant Tether’s USDT stablecoin product.
Its former chairman and CEO Howard Lutnick, an advisor to Donald Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign, is now U.S. Commerce Secretary.