Digital asset custody platform Fireblocks today announced a $550 million Series E funding round at an $8 billion valuation.
The fresh capital injection, which makes Fireblocks the highest-valued digital asset infrastructure provider in the world, was led by D1 Capital Partners and Spark Capital. General Atlantic, Altimeter, Index Ventures and CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund are also participating in today’s funding round.
The latest funding brings the total capital raised by Fireblocks from day one to $1 billion in total. 2021 was a remarkable year of funding by the Israeli cryptocurrency security company. The New York-based startup, which develops a secure platform for the transfer of digital assets, raised $310 million in July 2021 at a $2 billion. That came a mere four months after it raised $133 million in Series C, which itself was announced four months after a $30 million Series B.
Michael Shaulov, CEO and Co-founder of Fireblocks, said: “Everything that’s happening at the cross-section of DeFi, NFTs, gaming, streaming, and entertainment will be the biggest emerging use cases in the next year and a half. People need to think about infrastructure that’s future-proof to layer more providers into the stack. You want to be agile, and consider whether the platform you’re selecting offers the security, custody, and control over assets that can apply to these use cases.”
Fireblocks helps expand crypto use cases
Fireblocks is backed by Tenaya Capital, Fidelity’s investment arm Eight Roads, and counts Revolut, Galaxy Digital, Celsius, Genesis, crypto.com and eToro among other large institutional players as clients. The company supports over 180 tokens and has obtained access to more than 50 major exchanges that are reportedly moving billions in digital assets each month.
The Israeli crypto unicorn launched its operation in 2019 and has since opened offices in the United Kingdom, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, and France. Today, it has over 500 customers that include global banks, crypto-native exchanges, lending desks, hedge funds and OTC desks.
Fireblocks’ technology, dubbed ‘Secure Transfer Environment,’ allows for trading digital assets between exchanges, wallets, custodians, and counterparties while meeting all enterprise security requirements. It offers safe transitions of crypto assets between those providers and claims to eliminate the theft of private keys or compromise of API keys and deposit addresses using the chip isolation technology (SGX).
Fireblocks also offers several different cases for its users, like earning passive income or safeguarding assets.
