As more and more people start holding and trading cryptocurrency, I think companies that are building dull but important crypto infrastructure for enterprises and financial institutions don’t get enough coverage.
Well, on Wednesday, crypto wallet and exchange Blockchain.com announced that they had raised a large round of funding, USD 300 million, that valued them at over USD 5 billion dollars.
I have had a Blockchain.com retail wallet for years, but the company has itself been laser-focused on building for institutions for even longer. This is unlike its more well-known and splashy competitor Coinbase.
Back in 2019, I had met one of the VCs who had invested in Blockchain.com in their early years. The VC had confirmed this enterprise focus (and had said therefore that Blockchain.com would probably not be interested in listing a set of tokenised assets that I was involved in building that that time).
That bet is paying off in a big way for them as cryptocurrency and decentralised finance becomes more and more mainstream among enterprises.
In 2018, the Blockchain.com CEO had appeared on a crypto-focused podcast and outlined the same vision that the company has since executed on: market makers, dark pools, bringing settlement times down, among others – in short, thinking like and hiring from top-level Wall Street institutions. The audio and the transcript is here.
In conclusion – Peter the CEO and the Blockchain.com team had anticipated and prepared for the institutional acceptance and mainstreaming that we’re seeing today. And the innovations in DeFI that we will continue to see (and discuss on this group).