Blockstream

Blockstream is a blockchain technology company led by co-founder Adam Back, headquartered in Victoria, Canada, with offices and staff worldwide. The company develops products and services for the storage and transfer of cryptocurrency.

The company had raised $210M as of 2021 from investors, including venture capital firms Horizons Ventures and AXA Strategic Ventures.

The Liquid Network
On October 12, 2015, Blockstream announced the release of its Liquid sidechain prototype which could allow for the transfer of assets between the Liquid sidechain and the bitcoin main blockchain. On October 11, 2018, a production-ready implementation of the Liquid sidechain was officially launched, called the Liquid Network, which is designed to facilitate interoperability between the Bitcoin main chain and the Liquid sidechain to extend Bitcoin’s capabilities.

Liquid is built using Elements Core, a sidechain protocol also designed by Blockstream and built on the Bitcoin Core codebase, which introduces several features including Confidential Transactions, Segregated Witnesses (or SegWit), native asset issuance, and new opcodes. Elements Core version 0.18.1.6 was released in March 2020.

Blockstream claims that Liquid reduces the delays and friction involved in a normal transfer of bitcoin. Blockstream asserts participating exchanges–including Bitfinex, BitMEX and OKCoin –can reduce counterparty risk for traders and enable near-instant financial transactions between their platform and other exchanges or a trader’s wallet(s). New blocks are added to the Liquid sidechain every minute, as opposed to Bitcoin's 10-minute block interval.

Blockstream Satellite
In 2017 Blockstream announced the availability of one-way satellite broadcasting of the full Bitcoin blockchain to enable the propagation of valid bitcoin transactions to people without Internet access or during a disruption event like an Internet blackout. In 2018 Blockstream extended the Bitcoin satellite network to four satellites across six coverage zones, adding Asia and Pacific region coverage. It also released API specifications to allow users to send data over its network. The network as of 2019 is only a one-way network and the user still needs a connection to the Bitcoin network to send transactions, which can include SMS gateways or higher cost internet.

Industry partnerships
Blockstream employs Bitcoin Core developers.

Blockstream developer Rusty Russell was one of the first developers to try implementing the Lightning Network during the summer of 2015.

In early 2018 Blockstream announced a partnership with Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE) to launch a cryptocurrency market data feed.

Blockstream partnered with Digital Garage, an Internet technology company based in Tokyo, in January 2019 to create Crypto Garage, a bitcoin and blockchain technology company which targets the Japanese institutional market.