If there is any doubt about the cryptocurrency boom, we need not look any further than the explosion of growth of certain companies in space. One such company is BlockFi, which announced today that it has closed a huge $350 million Series D fund that it valued at $3 billion. While it is certainly interesting to note in this news and in itself, it is even more impressive when you raised a $50 million valuation to a $450 million Series C just last August.
With its total equity raised since the latest financing raised to about $450 million, the company has raised $100 million across its Seed and Series C rounds. Jack Prince – who comes from a background in customer lending – founded BlockFi with Flurry Marquez in 2017. New Jersey-based startup Jersey City closed in 2018 and raised $1.6 million in a seed scholarship led by Consensus Ventures, which includes SFI participation.
Prince describes BlockFi as a financial services company for crypto market investors that provides retail and institutional-face suites of products. On the retail side of its platform, people can use its mobile app to earn, buy and sell crypto in their crypto holdings (6% of Bitcoin, 8.6% on stability) and get low-cost loans secured by their price can get, “he said.
In particular, clients can buy and sell digital assets (from Bitcoin, Ethereum and Link to Litecoin, PaxG and multiple stablecoins) directly on BlockFi. The startup is also a provider and provider of business services to companies participating in the digital asset market. It is a model that looks like it is working in a big way. By the end of 2019, BlockFi’s client base had grown from 10,000 to more than 225,000. Today, BlockFi has 265,000 funded retail clients and more than 200 institutional clients. In addition, it has paid more than $10 billion for its retail, corporate and institutional clients.
Over the past year, BlockFi has also performed the following:
- Its monthly income has risen to more than $50 million from $1.5 million a month earlier.
- This is an increase of about 530 headcounts from 100 last March.
- The company has since grown its portfolio to $15 billion, with a 0% loss across its portfolio – an increase in the number of assets on its platform from $1 billion last March.
“Less than six months after the end of our Series C, Bitcoin and other digital assets have taken a central role in many investors’ portfolios and larger financial markets,” Prince said. “Our vision of the future of digital assets has been proven by our client base, which has increased tenfold per year by 2020 and more than doubled since the end of 2020.”
