Ambient Raises $74 Million to Build Blockchain ‘Replacement for Bitcoin’

Artificial intelligence (AI)-infused blockchain Ambient has raised $74 million in new funding.

That financing, CoinDesk reported Tuesday (April 1), will help the company develop a blockchain that is “ultimately designed as a replacement for Bitcoin,” as co-founder Travis Good put it.

The report notes that while that claim may sound far-fetched, Good argues it is based in reality, saying that bitcoin’s encryption mechanisms are “getting really stale” and could be “completely obsolete within five years,” presenting a problem for miners.

“You’ve got people who’ve invested billions of dollars in hash power for securing a network in ASICs,” he told CoinDesk at this year’s ethDenver conference. “And the question is like, where do they all go?”

Good says the answer is Ambient and its AI capabilities — that could one day be a “decentralized competitor to OpenAI.”

The network operates on a proof-of-work mechanism that Good said will have familiar appeal to bitcoin miners, making it an easy transition.

“It’s a useful proof of work network, which we don’t think anyone has ever done well in crypto,” he told CoinDesk.

In other blockchain-related news, PYMNTS recently explored how multinational corporations, FinTech platforms and banks are increasingly turning to the technology for cross-border payments, liquidity management and programmable finance.

“But many can hit a wall when it comes to integrating stablecoin infrastructure that is secure, compliant, scalable and actually usable by corporate finance teams,” that report said.

The issue is technical as well as strategic. Companies require more than a crypto wallet with a few layers of abstraction. Rather, they need multi-user access, audit trails, governance controls and seamless compliance tooling.

“When you think about the needs of every FinTech or payments company, or a bank that wants to enter the space, they need secure infrastructure, from the creation of assets, such as tokenizing them, to holding them, and of course moving them,” Bentzi Rabi, co-founder and CEO of Utila, said in an interview PYMNTS.

After all, in traditional finance, a corporate treasury system is connected to banks, tracks permissions, keeps on top of every transaction and supports full auditability.

However, when enterprises want to interact with the blockchain — whether for stablecoin vendor payments, on-chain settlements or transmitting money across borders — there is a stark lack of that sort of tooling.