By: Joshua Aldio, Business Associate
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Bitcoin is getting a boost by way of a new Taproot-enabled protocol known as Taproot Asset Representation Overlay, or Taro (like the root vegetable, not the playing cards). Taro is an open-source protocol powered by the Lightning Network (LN).
On Tuesday, Elizabeth Stark, co-founder and CEO of Lightning Labs, announced Taro and its bid to bring assets like stablecoins to the Bitcoin blockchain.
In addition, Lightning Labs announced that it raised $70 million in Series B funding, led by Valor Equity Partners and joined by global asset manager Baillie Gifford.
Stark said Taro improves Bitcoin’s functionality and is possible because of Taproot, an upgrade that was activated last year. Taproot featured three upgrades: Schnorr signatures, Tapscript and Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST); it provides efficiency, privacy and flexibility gains to Bitcoin, but only if built into tools for users by developers. Taro represents what might become possible when Taproot is put to work.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Lightning Labs Director of Business Development Ryan Gentry said the protocol is “uniquely enabled by Taproot to embed spending conditions into MASTs without disclosing all details to the blockchain. Using MASTs, Taro embeds data for new assets such that these assets can all be treated as bitcoins.”
When asked about the $70 million Series B announced in conjunction with Taro, Stark said the combined approach was intentional.
“The goal of the announcement was to focus on the technology [Taro]; raising money is solely the means, not the end,” Stark said.
The funds will be used to bolster Lightning Lab’s runway flexibility and act as fuel to grow the company, she said. Lightning Labs is still a small company with only 24 employees on its team page.
Valor Equity and Baillie Gifford, Goldcrest Capital, Kingsway, Moore Strategic Ventures, Brevan Howard, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, and NYDIG participated in the funding round, in addition to Silvergate CEO Alan Lane.
Baillie Gifford, a traditional finance company with a long operating history, being in the investor group marks another entry into investing in crypto infrastructure after it invested in Blockstream and Blockchain.com. Stark mentioned that the asset manager is a “long-term-oriented investor, so they’re really a perfect fit for what we are trying to accomplish.”
Bitcoin Technical Analysis
Bitcoin is moving into a fresh support level (resistance transitioning to support). We foresee that Bitcoin will continue its bullish movement toward $45,000. We can see there are also two rejection candlesticks in that area. We still have a bullish bias in Bitcoin toward the nearest psychological price of $50,000.
Trading Call: Buy at $45,000
Traders and investors can utilize Tokenomy’s Dual Currency Deposit to place pending orders and earn yield while waiting for the order to be executed.
DCD Reference : USDT/BTC at $44,000 or USDT/BTC at $45,000
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