Harbor raises $10M for its blockchain compliance platform

Harbor, a San Francisco, CA-based blockchain technology company, has announced its raised $10m in Series A financing.

Fifth Wall Ventures, a venture capital firm that specializes in real estate startups, participated in the Series A round along with Vy Capital and Valor Equity Partners.

Founded last year by Zenefits veterans Arisa Amano and Bob Remeika, San Francisco-based Harbor sells compliance technology for crypto-securities offerings. The company, which was previously incubated by Craft Ventures, aims to build a decentralized compliance protocol for standardizing crypto-securities issuance and trading, following that the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission has warned that many ICOs may ultimately be classified as securities and has already taken action against several firms for violations.

Harbor helps protect issuers and investors by making it easier to abide by securities, tax and other regulatory requirements when issuing and trading crypto-securities.

The Regulated Token (R-Token) standard, one of Harbor’s first initiatives, is an open source compliance framework for embedding regulatory compliance at the token level, only permitting transactions to occur if they meet applicable rules. Issuers, broker dealers, underwriters, and/or regulatory bodies can implement the R-Token standard to meet jurisdictional securities regulations, know your customer (KYC) policies, anti-money laundering (AML) requirements, tax considerations, and more. The R-Token standard is a system of ERC-20 smart contracts built on the Ethereum blockchain and compatible with the ERC-20 ecosystem.

“Fifth Wall believes Harbor’s protocol is precisely the standard the industry needs to trigger a tsunami of real estate assets that will tokenize, ICO, and trade on the blockchain,” Brad Greiwe, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Fifth Wall, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “This represents the most profound, disruptive change to real estate capital markets ever and the potential to spur the mass adoption of institutional blockchain solutions within the broader real estate industry.”