The LSE Directory / Crypto exchanges
River is a United States bitcoin-only financial services company. Clients can buy and sell bitcoin, hold it in River's full-reserve custody, mine it through a managed hosted mining product, and, since April 2026, bank with it: a single account that pays a published yield in bitcoin on cash balances and supports payroll direct deposit and bill pay in place of a conventional checking and savings account. USD deposits are held by partner Lead Bank and are FDIC insured up to $250,000; bitcoin balances carry no such insurance. Unlike multi-asset exchanges, River deliberately limits its product line to bitcoin only, a positioning CEO Alex Leishman has described as building "the bitcoin bank of the world" for savers and long-term holders rather than active multi-coin traders. It builds its trading, custody and banking infrastructure in-house rather than outsourcing to third-party providers, runs River Mining, a managed service that lets retail clients buy hosted, professionally operated mining hardware without running machines themselves, and operates River Financial 1, a Lightning Network node that a 2022 industry report ranked the fourth largest in the world by channel capacity. River was founded in 2019 by Alex Leishman, who serves as CEO and CTO, and Andrew Benson. It is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in Columbus, Ohio, a 30-job global operations hub for accounting, analytics, cybersecurity, compliance and client operations, and in New York. Disclosed funding includes a $5.7 million seed round in June 2020 (Polychain Capital, Slow Ventures, Castle Island Ventures and others), a $12 million Series A in March 2021 led by Goldcrest Capital, and a $35 million Series B in May 2023 led by Kingsway Capital with investors including Peter Thiel. River holds NMLS ID 1906809, publishes an independently verifiable proof-of-reserves attestation for its full-reserve bitcoin custody, and in April 2025 said it became the first bitcoin-only exchange to publish its own financial statements publicly. The April 2026 banking launch is River's clearest step yet from brokerage toward the full "bitcoin bank" it has described since founding, pairing zero-fee recurring bitcoin purchases and payroll direct deposit with everyday cash management inside one bitcoin-denominated account.
