Ethereum Cofounder Invests $6.5 Million In A Former Competitor
Ethereum cofounder Joe Lubin has formed an unusual partnership with DrumG, a stealth startup emerging today and founded by several senior level executives from R3, one of the ethereum blockchain’s most heavily funded competitors. As part of the $6.5 million cash investment by Lubin’s ConsenSys blockchain startup, the company will take a minority stake in DrumG, and Lubin himself will join as the sole outside member of the board of directors. The unusual partnership between individuals who have invested so much time and money to build competing platforms is a result of a series of equally unusual conditions in the rapidly evolving blockchain ecosystem. In many cases, the creators of the open-source platforms designed to replace middlemen across industries with a shared, distributed ledger are the same people helping enterprises build on those platforms. To remove that potential conflict of interest, Bermuda-based DrumG is the latest of a new breed of companies founded by people who helped build these blockchains but who then left to help enterprises build real-world applications on a wide range of interconnected ledgers.
