The France-based exchange Paymium has just concluded a financing round during which it managed to raise approximately 1 million euros. The round included notable financiers such as Newfund Management and Kima Ventures.
Paymium was founded in 2011 by David François, Pierre Noizat and Gonzague Grandval and became the first European Bitcoin exchange to be fully compliant with EU regulations regarding payment services. The company also offers their service as a payment processor for merchants, allowing them to accept Bitcoin payments.
Pierre Noizat, President ad Co-Founder of Paymium had the following to say about their upcoming plans:
“We intend to increase our trade volume by five by the end of 2016. In addition, the interest of Blockchain technology, on which Bitcoin grows, is now widely recognized by the banking sector. This paves the way to new applications in the field of digital trust and payments, … “
“We feel good because the ground is very vast, tens of thousands of merchants have yet to adopt bitcoin, so we welcome big players pushing bitcoin to more merchants.”
On top of increasing their trade volume, Paymium plans to expand it’s services to new markets and increase the size of their team, which currently sits at eight members.
The company is not without controversy though, on 2014 Paymium merged with another French exchange, Bitcoin-Central, which was owned by David François. Back in 2013, François also managed a service known as InstaWallet, which as its name indicates, provided instant wallets tied to an URL and was widely used as a stopgap between addresses.
That same year InstaWallet was the victim of a massive hack during which thousands of Bitcoins were lost once attackers realized the random addresses were indexed by Google. Over 20,000 wallets were compromised due to the attack and although the company did return the funds of many of its users, others claimed the attack itself had been used as a cover for the company to steal the funds of others. These allegations remain unproved.
