You can join our Clubhouse room today at 9am Pacific time (5pm UK, 6pm Europe) for the inside of how we select the news and record our Global Venturing Review podcast.
Share your insights and chat afterwards on the hottest funds, deals and people moves of the past week and let us know what we should have been covering… https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/MEXz791p
One of the stories that will be discussed is UK-based cryptocurrency exchange provider Blockchain.com, which raised a $120m strategic growth round.
These investors included Access Industries, an investment and industrial group founded by Leonard Blavatnik, GV (formerly known as Google Ventures and one of Alphabet’s corporate venturing units), venture capital firms Lakestar and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Moore Strategic Ventures (Louis Bacon’s hedge fund’s venture unit), Kyle Bass (founder and principal of Hayman Capital Management hedge fund), Eldridge and Rovida Advisors.
When Blockchain.com set out to raise its series A round in late 2014, there were only a handful of venture-backed crypto companies and a bitcoin was worth hundreds of dollars.
Six years later and Bitcoin has crossed what Blockchain called the “monumental price target of $50,000” and the company provides 65 million wallets in 200-plus countries. More than a quarter (28%) of all Bitcoin transactions since 2012 have occurred via Blockchain.com, it added.
Peter Smith, Blockchain.com’s CEO and founder, said: “The current bull run is dominated by stories of Fortune 500 companies, investment funds, and institutions driving net inflows into crypto. The fact that the best macro investors in the world participated in our latest fundraise is further proof that institutions are taking a serious look at their crypto strategy.”
Jalak Jobanputra, founder of VC firm Future Perfect Ventures, which invested in Blockchain.com’s 2014 round, in her newsletter put part of the institutional moves down to bitcoin having decoupled from other assets over fears of inflation. She said: “The last couple of weeks have felt like we have moved decades forward in the sector, and this seems to be accelerating daily.”
She tagged the recent institutional moves into
- MassMutual purchased $100m of bitcoin (12/10/2020)
- Visa plans to introduce cryptocurrency payments on its network (1/31/2021)
- Tesla purchased $1.5bn worth of bitcoin for their balance sheet and plans to accept the cryptocurrency as payment for their vehicles in the future (2/8/2021)
- BNY Mellon will custody cryptocurrency on behalf of its clients (2/11/2021)
- Mastercard will support select cryptocurrencies on its payment platform (2/10/2021)
- Microstrategy filed to offer $600m in convertible notes in order to buy more Bitcoin (02/16/2021)
- Blackrock’s fixed income chief investment officer says the firm has begun to invest in Bitcoin, following a January filing that two Blackrock funds would invest in Bitcoin (2/17/2021)
Jobanputra differentiates between cryptoassets, such as bitcoin and ethereum, and blockchain technology being used a distributed ledger technology platform layer. In her speech at the GCV Symposium in May 2018, most financial institutions had planned to use blockchain by this year, causing demand for the cryptoassets to follow.
But for how long is open to debate.
