The new exchange has just closed a $3.25 million funding round co-led by Canaan Partners and RRE Ventures and joined by Liberty City Ventures and angel investors including Jay Jordan and Ben Davenport. Total funding is now $5.5 million.

The itBit global platform operates as a traditional currency exchange with a central limit order book, letting commercial businesses and institutional and retail investors trade bitcoin - which has seen its value soar to more than $350 in recent days - with US dollars, Singapore dollars and Euros.

Currently it is not open to retail investors in the US but the firm says that it is seeking regulatory approval there on a state-by-state basis and some of the new funding will be used to pursue this.

With bitcoin in the cross-hairs of governments around the world, the firm is promising to take a proactive approach to ensure its operations are always in full regulatory compliance with the laws of its home country and the countries of its users. The outfit is tapping Thomson Reuters for screening and continuous suspicious activity monitoring, and Jumio for identity verification.

ItBit is also hoping to stand out from the crowd of bitcoin exchanges around the world by stressing its strong technology platform, which is based on Nasdaq exchange technology and can cross millions of trades per second at peak performance.

Meanwhile, with several exchanges having fallen victim to hackers recently, itBit is employing multi-factor authentication, multiple layers of DDoS attack mitigation provided by Akamai Technologies, cold storage techniques and defence-in-depth security.

Rich Teo, CEO, itBit, says: "Fully realised, Bitcoin will fuel a truly global economy, and give the power and security of digital payments to the unbanked. We built itBit to be part of the underlying infrastructure that supports that greater global economy."