 This is the Daily Decrypt and the currency competition is on. I am your host, Amanda B. Johnson, and today's episode is brought to you by Oracle Eyes. If one wants to know the direction that a certain effort or organization is heading in, as they say, it pays to follow the money. Bitcoin Core developers are largely employed by a company called Blockstream who has just announced that they have recently raised 55 million US dollars in venture capital funding. To get a better idea of the direction that this money will steer Bitcoin Core development in, review this article with me from Brave New Coin. Just six days after Blockstream announced a strategic partnership with Price Waterhouse Coopers, PwC, an even larger announcement from the Bitcoin software development company has been announced. A 55 million US dollar investment was just raised by Blockstream, the company's second round, bringing their total investment up to 76 million dollars. Blockstream CEO Austin Hill said that the money will be used, quote, to further enhance our sidechain technology, expand our operations globally, and support new industry partnerships, end quote, similar to the one made with PwC only days before. Francois Robinet, a managing partner at one of the round's key investors, AXA Strategic Ventures, stated that, quote, Blockstream has the best technical team in the industry and we strongly believe in their approach of developing foundational infrastructure for various blockchain applications, end quote. Other investors in the round include Horizons Ventures, who led the funding round, Digital Garage, AME Cloud Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Future Perfect Ventures, COSLA Ventures, Mosaic Ventures, and Seven Seas Venture Partners. Hill also announced that Francis Kang from Horizons Ventures had joined the board of directors at Blockstream. Here's a quote from Francois Robinet. We value Blockstream's open source approach to its sidechain technology, which will allow interoperability between different chains and provide critical long-term success in this sector. We also look forward to partnering with Blockstream to drive the transformation of insurance and asset management businesses, end quote. While a 55 million dollar investment certainly shows continued interest in the company, the exposure PWC is offering Blockstream is easily underestimated. PWC is a multinational professional service provider with 35.4 billion in revenue last year. The company will be, quote, collaborating on existing solutions and developing offerings, end quote, with Blockstream. Robert Swack, PWC Vice Chairman of Clients and Markets, says, quote, In the last year, we have helped 443 of the companies in the FT Global 500 list and 418 of those in the Fortune Global 500 list. We also advise and work with more than 100,000 entrepreneurial and private businesses around the world, end quote. The auditing firm made their intentions clear when they opened an office recently, just for blockchain research and product development. Following the partnership with Blockstream, it's likely that they will be working closely with Bitcoin's blockchain. Blockstream's senior VP, Alex Fowler, made a firm statement lately in an interview with International Business Times, quote, New fangled code and technology is not what a bank wants. It's not what an enterprise that's looking to put financial assets onto a shared distributed ledger wants. They don't want to have that secured with math and science that someone came up with in the last year. They want the battle-tested, peer-reviewed, open technology stack that when they, banks and enterprises, put their assets on it, they know it won't be hacked or be taken down because it can't scale. And there is only one protocol that has that level of peer review, public testing and verification, and that's the Bitcoin code base, end quote. The article finishes by saying, with such overwhelming support and funding from the small blocks camp, the block size may remain where it is for quite some time. Those who are ideologically opposed to Core's direction may leave it partially or entirely to put their wealth into competing cryptocurrencies. And those who are ideologically aligned may enter Bitcoin for the first time. As I said before, the currency competition is on. Today's episode has been brought to you by Oracleize, which is a provably honest Oracle service that works with either Ethereum or Bitcoin. Oracleize is a cutting edge service for those who would like to use smart contracts in their financial dealings. The service can pull data feeds from real-world events, making your financial contracts execute without the need for human intervention. You can learn more about how this works at oracleize.it Leave a comment on today's video if you like, and as always, be excellent to each other.