Funding News: Blockdaemon Secures $155M, Genesis Digital Assets Raises $431M
The new fundraising brings Blockdaemon’s total valuation to $1.255 billion, adding it to the list of companies that have reached unicorn status.
Blockworks exclusive Art by Axel Rangel
key takeaways
- Over the past year, Blockdaemon has increased its valuation over 70 times and had a 20 times increase in revenue, it said
- One of the largest industrial-scale Bitcoin mining companies, Genesis Digital Assets, plans to expand mining operations in the US and Nordic countries
Blockchain infrastructure company Blockdaemon has raised $155 million in a Series B round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, the company said in an announcement Tuesday.
The new fundraising brings Blockdaemon’s total valuation to $1.255 billion, adding it to the list of companies that have reached unicorn status, which consists of having a valuation of $1 billion or greater.
Over the past year, Blockdaemon has increased its valuation over 70 times and had a 20 times increase in revenue. Additionally it has averaged more than $10 billion in staked assets across the over 40 protocols it supports, the company said.
Additional participants in this round were Matrix Capital Management, Sapphire Ventures, and Morgan Creek Digital. Pre-existing seed round investors who also increased their investments this round are Boldstart Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Greenspring Associates, CoinFund, Kenetic, Kraken Ventures, Borderless Capital and Lerer Hippeau.
“We are committed to a future of decentralized financial infrastructure and accelerating the ease of integration to bridge traditional banking to the crypto ecosystem. As regulations get further defined, a backer of the caliber of SoftBank and Masa’s experience is crucial,” said Konstantin Richter, CEO and founder of Blockdaemon, in a statement.
The capital will be used to expand the company’s presence in Singapore, Japan, the United Kingdom and Germany. Additionally, it will help the company make acquisitions to build out its tech stack.
“Blockdaemon will also expand into providing liquidity solutions for large scale institutional adoption, starting with ETH 2.0, where Blockdaemon is active and running over 12,000 validators. This makes Blockdaemon the largest operator in the ETH 2.0 space,” according to a company blog post. Since each validator requires 32 $ETH staked on Ethereum’s “beacon chain” (which is planned to merge with the current Ethereum mainnet in early 2022), that represents some 384,000 ether locked, worth over $1.1 billion as of today’s $ETH price.
Tuesday was a busy day for SoftBank. Separately, the Japanese-based firm also announced it led the latest $680 million round for the NFT soccer platform Sorare. Paris-based Sorare will use the new funding to recruit new talent in Europe and the US, sign new partnerships, accelerate on mobile and marketing, and expand into new sports in 2022, beyond the world of soccer.
In May, SoftBank tripled the size of its Vision Fund 2 to $30 billion, according to a previous statement by Navneet Govil, chief financial officer of SoftBank Investment Advisers. The fund is the company’s second massive venture capital-based portfolio.
Genesis Digital Assets New Funding
One of the largest industrial-scale bitcoin mining companies, Genesis Digital Assets, has announced a strategic raise of $431 million on Tuesday.
The round was led by Paradigm and included investments from NYDIG, Stoneridge, FTX, Ribbit, Electric Capital, Skybridge, and Kingsway Capital, who invested $125 million in a previous round earlier this year. Investors in Kingsway Capital include the family offices of Paul Tudor Jones, Paul Marshall, and Winter Capital, the company said.
In addition to the round, Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner of Paradigm, joined the company’s board of directors.
The company has been around since 2013, just a few years after the crypto industry began. Since then it has built over 20 industrial-scale mining farms and brought over 300,000 miners online. To date, it has mined over $1 billion in bitcoin, Blockworks previously reported.
“As we work towards our goal of bringing 1.4 gigawatts online by 2023, the capital raised from this round will be used to expand our bitcoin mining operations in locations where clean energy is easily accessible,” which includes the US and Nordic countries, Marco Streng, CEO and co-founder of Genesis Digital Assets, said.
As of September, the company’s data center capacity was over 170 megawatts, which equates to a total hashrate of more than 3.3 exahashes or about 2.4% of the global bitcoin mining hashrate, it said.
During the next 12 months, the Bitcoin mining company expects another 8.6 exahashes to go online and by the end of 2023 it anticipates reaching a capacity of over 1.4 gigawatts.
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