Blockdaemon, a NewYork based startup that provides blockchain infrastructure as a service has raised $155 million in funding at a valuation of $1.26 billion in its Series B round. The latest funding round is lead by the Softbank Vision fund 2. Other investors who participated in the current round include Matrix Capital Management, Sapphire Ventures, and Morgan Creek Digital, as well as existing investors Boldstart Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Greenspring Associates, CoinFund, Kinetic, Kraken Ventures, Borderless Capital, and Lerer Hippeau.
The startup had earlier raised Series A in June 2021 of $28 million. That round was led by the venture capital firm Greenspring Associates and drew support from Goldman Sachs, BlockFi, Voyager Digital, Uphold, CoinShares, Borderless Capital, and Blockchain.com Ventures. Over the last 90 days, the startup has significantly accelerated its growth and increased its managed node count from 8,000 to 18,000, more than doubling its operational footprint.
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.
Konstantin Richter, CEO and Founder of Blockdaemon
Blockchain infrastructure as a service or traditionally called managed node provider service is growing at a rapid pace with the global adoption of blockchain and crypto economy. Another similar startup that created a lot of buzz in the market is Alchemy, which claims to be the AWS for blockchain. Alchemy has raised a total of $95.5 million since it launched in 2017 and is valued at half a billion dollars already.
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While Alchemy positions itself as “AWS for blockchain” and is primarily focused on building ready to use developer-friendly tools ecosystem for quick and hassle-free adoption and accelerated development of blockchain technology. Blockdaemon on the other hand comes out even stronger with a unique marketplace approach by combining the development ecosystem for developers and a decentralized finance ecosystem for financial investors.
Blockdaemon supports 40+ blockchain networks including ETH 2.0, Bitcoin, Solana, Terra, Cardano, Polkadot, Cosmos, and the Lightning Network in the cloud and on bare metal servers globally through the Blockdaemon Marketplace. On top Blockdaemon also powers the institutional backbone of transactions and yields earnings for tens of millions of registered users across some of the largest exchanges, custodians, investors, and financial institutions in the world.
Over the past year, Blockdaemon has seen tremendous growth and traction. It operates more than 10,000 ETH 2.0 validator nodes and has more than $10 billion staked assets on its platform. It has also expanded its operation across the globe by adding more data centers in different regions also added multiple layers of risk mitigation with regional and data center diversification over the past year and put into place an insurance guarantee for its customers.
With the new fund, Blockdaemon is planning international expansion to bring on world-class talent in Singapore, Japan, the UK, and Germany. It also plans to make relevant acquisitions to strengthen its market position and expand its financial reporting capabilities for institutions and deepen its infrastructure capabilities to ease integration for the next phase of the blockchain ecosystem.
