Interstellar: Lightyear Buys Chain to Merge Public and Private Blockchains on Stellar

The Stellar Development Foundation has acquired the venture-backed blockchain enterprise Chain Inc., through its for-profit subsidiary Lightyear.

The Stellar Development Foundation has acquired the venture-backed blockchain enterprise Chain Inc., through its for-profit subsidiary Lightyear Corporation. The new company will be named Interstellar, will be based in San Francisco, and will have a New York City office.

Stellar, like Ripple, is a platform designed to facilitate the transfer of assets through partnerships but Stellar has a much more bottom-up approach than its cousin. Chain Inc., is an enterprise software company that builds cryptographic ledgers. 

According to Chain´s CEO Adam Ludwin, who will also serve as Interstellar’s CEO, the new company will create a platform for the issuing, exchange, and management of assets after migrating all of Chain Inc.’s products and user-base onto Stellar’s global public ledger. Interstellar will remain independent from the Stellar Development Foundation, and Jed McCaleb will become the CTO of the new Interstellar.

Mr. Ludwin explained in a Reuter’s interview,

We were looking for a way to help our customers move the projects that we have been working on from a private network to a public one […] When we started a few years ago, our customers were not ready for a public network. Fast forward to three years, they’re willingness has gone up, and the maturity of the public networks has changed a lot.

Although no details were given about the buyout, Mr. Ludwin declared Chain investors were “cashed out”, finalizing a negotiation process that was ongoing since last year, as reported on Bitrates. Mr. Ludwin added that the deal “turned out to be a very good outcome for our investors”.

Mr. McCaleb added regarding the enterprise,

Chain’s team has led the market for enterprise adoption of blockchain technology, which is a critical component of building a future where money and digital assets move over open protocols […] We are thrilled to be joining forces to help organizations build on Stellar.