ING Bank-Backed Crypto Trade Platform Pyctor Is Raising Money

Pyctor, which provides the so-called "plumbing" or infrastructure that allow other platforms to handle their crypto and digital assets after trades have been completed, is in the process of raising money.

Led by Netherlands-based ING Bank, Pyctor is a collaboration involving ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas Securities Services, Citibank, Invesco, Société Générale – Forge, State Street, UBS and others.

ING blockchain lead Herve Francois, who is overseeing development of the project, said Pyctor has been incorporated and is raising external money.

“I can tell that we are looking for external investors for Pyctor (be it financial institutions or Venture Capitalists) to capture the exponential growth in digital assets that we are currently witnessing,” Francois told Coindesk.

Francois said he could not comment on the amount being raised or if the project’s member banks were also taking part in the investment round.

Pyctor, which is part of the Cohort 6 of the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority Regulatory sandbox, is a digital asset post-trade market infrastructure for global custodians, institutional issuers and other capital market actors.

“We are moving forward. We have done a production-ready launch of Pyctor and have started onboarding clients now,” Francois said. “We are using MPC [multi-party-computation] in the Pyctor operating model and have also released the open source code.”