Crypto funding: 3 crypto companies secure $90M+ raises
Amid a funding dry spell, this week saw three of the largest crypto raises in recent months.
Crypto exchange and wallet service Blockchain.com raised $110 million in a Series E round led by Kingsway, the parent company of crypto exchange OSL raised $91 million via a share subscription, and tokenized currency firm Fnality announced a $95 million round led by Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas.
The raises came with crypto mired in a funding slump, seeing consecutive quarterly declines in venture capital dating back to the start of 2022.
Blockchain.com’s $110 million round is the year’s fourth-largest fundraise, following Blockstream, LayerZero, and Worldcoin, according to DeFiLlama data. The company declined to disclose a valuation but Bloomberg reported a valuation of less than half of the $14 billion mark the platform secured last year.
With the move, Manny Stotz, CEO of UK venture firm Kingsway and Nicolas Brand, partner at VC fund Lakestar, will join Blockchain.com’s board of directors.
Hong Kong-based BC Technology Group, which owns the crypto exchange OSL, acquired $91 million when crypto firm BGX purchased almost 30% of the company’s stock through a share subscription.
In August, OSL joined HashKey as the first exchanges to acquire Hong Kong’s new license to facilitate retail crypto trading in the city.
Fnality is a fintech firm focused in part on tokenizing securities — that is, making traditional financial assets like gold or Treasury bonds synthetic and storing them on the blockchain.
The tokenization of real-world assets has been popular among financial institutions as of late. JPMorgan and HSBC both ramped up potential tokenization offerings in recent weeks.
The centralized finance platforms’ raises come amid a longer-term slide in centralized finance funding relative to decentralized platforms.
Read more: JPMorgan tests tokenized portfolios with Avalanche blockchain tech
Tokenization’s big week continues
Tokenization company Superstate raised $14 million in a Series A led by CoinFund and Distributed Global, joining Fnality as the week’s other notable tokenization raise.
Superstate is helmed by Robert Leshner, who founded the DeFi lending firm Compound before leaving to create Superstate. The raise comes less than five months after Superstate’s $4 million seed round was announced. The company filed an SEC prospectus at around the same time to let clients store tokenized government bonds on Ethereum.
At Blockworks’ Permissionless conference in August, Leshner said DeFi’s onboarding of major institutions would require the space to compromise on crypto-native assets in favor of a focus on tokenization.
“This is the big divide that is going to define the next ten years of DeFi,” Leshner said at the time.
Other notable fundraises
- K-Pop fan engagement startup Modhaus raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Sfermion.
- CFX Labs raised $9.5 million in seed funding to grow its remittance-focused stablecoin payment product on Solana.
- Bitcoin ordinals project Taproot Wizards announced a $7.5 million seed round led by Standard Crypto.
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