River Financial, a Bitcoin-based financial institution, has reported average monthly volume increases of 80 percent, a doubling of clients each month since January 2020 and has recently closed a $5.7 million seed round to continue development of its suite of bitcoin financial services. It partly attributes this growth to the unbridled economic stimulation efforts undertaken by central banks this year.
“The surging activity we’ve seen since the beginning of 2020 has been in part inspired by the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented monetary intervention,” said Alex Leishman, River Financial's CEO, in a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. “Additionally, Bitcoin is growing in the eyes of legacy investors like Paul Tudor Jones, Dan Tapiero, Raoul Pal and others. These seasoned macro investors are showing a growing interest in bitcoin as the asset class continues to become legitimized within the mainstream finance community.”
The release added that, since March 2020, 77 percent of River’s volume can be attributed to what it calls “Bitcoin Boomers” — investors over the age of 55 who are investing in bitcoin as a hedge against potential inflation caused by the Federal Reserve’s stimulus efforts.
River launched in late 2019 with the hopes of creating a financial services company focused exclusively on the original cryptocurrency.
“The hypothesis for our company is that bitcoin is going to continue to grow as a money and a store of value,” Leishman told Bitcoin Magazine earlier this year. “We’re building this company around financial services, assuming bitcoin is going to be used as money.”
By narrowing its focus in this way, River hopes to offer particularly secure infrastructure based on protocol-level tools and cold storage. It has integrated the Lightning Network into its services and wants to leverage hardware wallet integration to support non-custodial financial products in the future.
Its recent multimillion-dollar seed round saw contributions from Polychain Capital, Castle Island Ventures, Square Crypto’s Steve Lee and others in the space. With the capital injection, River hopes to scale its infrastructure, build additional products, work toward offering mobile services and expand its client reach in the U.S.
“We see River Financial as bridging the gap between traditional finance and Bitcoin,” said Polychain Capital Founder Olaf Carlson-Wee, per the release. “The evolution of finance is only happening faster in the wake of the current global economic crisis, which has illuminated holes within traditional financial systems that can potentially be filled by Bitcoin.”
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