Blockdaemon’s recent Series B round of funding is the biggest for any blockchain node infrastructure provider in the industry to date. Today, we share a major milestone in Blockdaemon’s journey.
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We are proud to announce that we have raised $155 million in investments from our partners with a valuation of $1.255 billion, making Blockdaemon the world’s largest blockchain infrastructure company for node management and staking. Led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Matrix Capital Management, Sapphire Ventures, and Morgan Creek Digital, the capital raised will help expand our team presence in Singapore, Japan, the UK and Germany.
It will also allow us to make strategic acquisitions and to build out our already robust tech stack.
Existing seed round investors Boldstart Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Greenspring Associates, CoinFund, Kenetic, Kraken Ventures, Borderless Capital, and Lerer Hippeau also increased their investments as part of the B round.
“Goldman Sachs is very pleased to continue our relationship with and investment in Blockdaemon as they continue to innovate for the financial services industry. We believe Blockdaemon has a key role to play in the future of blockchain and crypto adoption,” said Oli Harris, North America head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs.
This achievement is a testament to our investors’ institutional support of a robust foundation for the blockchain industry’s future. Blockdaemon offers access to new financial infrastructure for a variety of market participants. These range from large financial institutions, exchanges and custodians to small, agile crypto native firms and developers. It is trusted across the blockchain ecosystem, including the industry’s leading networks, exchanges, enterprises, custodians, developers, and funds.
Konstantin Richter, CEO and Founder of Blockdaemon, said, “This latest large infusion of capital is another major milestone for Blockdaemon and will ensure that we continue to revitalize existing financial infrastructure around the globe. 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. We are deeply gratified to have the support and confidence of the financial, tech and VC titans who made this latest round possible.”
This Series B cements Blockdaemon as the world’s largest independent blockchain infrastructure platform for institutions. We are the foundational layer to the blockchain industry, enabling participants to stake and deploy nodes with institutional-grade security, scalability, and reliability.
Blockdaemon will use this new round to further grow our regulatory and compliance functions, as well as investing in international diversification. 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.
“Institutions today are looking for essential tooling to help them quickly adapt and integrate into the burgeoning digital asset space. We think Blockdaemon’s best-in-class technology addresses these needs, with enterprise-grade assurance. We are excited to support Blockdaemon’s mission to scale the next generation of blockchain infrastructure and become the backbone of tomorrow's multichain universe.” – Era Qian of Matrix Capital Management
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The Industry Today
2021 has been a year of incredibly strong growth for the blockchain industry.
We have seen large-scale institutional interest in areas such as proof-of-stake and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). As of September 2021, almost $100bn of value is locked in DeFi. As investment in the space ramps-up, robust, reliant infrastructure becomes increasingly important. This infrastructure is the bedrock for network participation. On the staking side, the industry eagerly anticipates the launch of Ethereum 2.0 (Eth 2.0).
We firmly believe that this will be the largest mass adoption event for DeFi to date. As of today, there is over 7 million Ether bonded to the Beacon Chain, with over 220,000 active validators. This highlights the significance of Eth 2.0’s development in the industry. “We believe Blockdaemon is a foundational layer to the blockchain industry, providing a suite of easy-to-use infrastructure products and services to help power the world’s top crypto exchanges, custodians, and funds,” said Nagraj Kashyap, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.
“We are delighted to partner with Konstantin and the Blockdaemon team to support their mission of making access to blockchain easier and more secure for financial institutions.”
Blockdaemon’s Growth
Blockdaemon has gained incredible momentum over the past year.
This strong traction culminated in a 70x increase in valuation, a 20x increase in revenue and a 5x increase in headcount. We have averaged more than $10bn in staked assets across the +40 protocols we support. We are also committed to supporting the networks we cater to. In the past 6 months, Blockdaemon has launched 10,000+ Eth 2.0 validators across our worldwide network of premium and eco-friendly data centers, from cloud to bare metal.
“As part of our recent strategic investments in the B2B crypto space, we are delighted to back Blockdaemon in its Series B round,” said Jai Das, partner, president and co-founder at Sapphire Ventures.
“This emerging market leader, with its institutional-grade node management and staking infrastructure, is helping to facilitate greater institutional participation in the digital asset ecosystem.”As we continue to grow, we have further bolstered our team of protocol experts and researchers. These will be directly involved in blockchain communities.
This showcases our involvement and support within the protocols we cater to.
"Blockdaemon is poised to lead the world in blockchain staking and infrastructure, and as an early investor Kenetic is happy to continue supporting their further expansion into Asia which is quickly becoming the global center of blockchain and crypto volume. With China's rapid adoption of financial and infrastructure based blockchain technology, Blockdaemon will play a key role in guaranteeing uptime and performance for critical platforms and enterprises across the region." Jehan Chu, Founder, Kenetic
The Path Ahead
The technology of the future will be decentralized.
This shift will rely on the groundbreaking protocols and tools being developed and launched today. We’re accelerating this future through our industry-leading products. This includes our single command-line API integration spanning over a dozen major protocols. This API integration can run transactions and read data across dedicated High-Availability (HA) blockchain node clusters for institutions.
Our fully compliant dedicated node infrastructure and liquidity solutions also bolsters this shift towards decentralization. We will continue to build out industry-leading infrastructure to support blockchain technology.
About Blockdaemon
Blockdaemon is the leading independent blockchain node infrastructure to stake, scale, and deploy nodes with institutional-grade security and monitoring. Supporting 40+ cutting edge blockchain networks in the cloud and on bare metal servers globally, Blockdaemon is used by exchanges, custodians, crypto platforms, financial institutions and developers to connect commercial stakeholders to blockchains.
We power the blockchain economy by simplifying the process of deploying nodes and creating scalable enterprise blockchain solutions via APIs, high availability clusters, auto-decentralization and auto-healing of nodes. For more information, please visit https://blockdaemon.com/.
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