Blockchain.com secures $110M Series E funding

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Cryptocurrency platform Blockchain.com revealed on Tuesday that it had raised $110 million in new Series E funding led by Kingsway Capital.

The investment round also involved Baillie Gifford, Lakestar, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coinbase Ventures and more. The Series E funding has reduced the company’s value to less than half of its $14 billion valuation in the spring of 2022, as reported by Bloomberg.

Blockchain.com had previously secured $490 million in capital funding in total, including $300 million in March 2021 from investors like Kingsway. On March 30, 2022, Blockchain.com completed a funding round that boosted its valuation from $5.2 billion to $14 billion.

This funding came from Baillie Gifford and Lightspeed Venture Partners shortly before the collapse of Do Kwon’s Terra ecosystem, which led to a liquidity crisis, bankrupting Three Arrows Capital (3AC) hedge fund and several prominent crypto lenders.

The recent $110 million funding came despite several months of a crypto bear market triggered by the cascading collapse of several major firms, including FTX. Blockchain.com disclosed that its revenue has still grown 1,500 percent in the last four years, surpassing the broader industry.

As part of the agreement, Blockchain.com is appointing Kingsway’s Manuel Stotz and Lakestar’s Nicolas Brand as members of Blockchain.com’s board of directors. With 20 years of experience in finance, Brand specializes in developing businesses that merge finance, blockchain and technology.

From Blockchain.info to Blockchain.com

Blockchain.com started as Blockchain.info in 2011, serving as a blockchain explorer tool that allowed users to inspect Bitcoin transactions and provided an API for developers to create on the Bitcoin network. It also developed one of the most popular cryptocurrency wallets, facilitating early crypto users in effectively handling their digital assets.

Per data retrieved by Decrypt, Blockchain.com has facilitated over $1 trillion in total transactions throughout its existence for over a decade and currently supports over 90 million crypto wallets.

Like numerous other crypto firms, Blockchain.com encountered difficulties due to the decline in token prices in 2022. The company revealed significant exposure to the 3AC collapse and had to reduce its workforce through layoffs.

This year, the cryptocurrency market started recovering, notably with Bitcoin’s price more than doubling due to optimism about the potential approval of an exchange-traded fund investing directly in the cryptocurrency. Additionally, there has been a recent emergence of new funds for investing in crypto, signaling a resurgence in venture capital investments targeting cryptocurrencies.

Biggest leveraged loss for crypto traders in three months

On Tuesday, cryptocurrency traders faced the biggest leveraged loss in three months as the ETF-driven surge in digital asset prices suddenly reversed.

Significant drops led to more than $307 million in liquidations of leveraged crypto long positions in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass data. This marks the highest amount of liquidated longs in a day since August 17, when BTC swiftly fell from over $28,000 to about $25,000 in a few minutes.

Today’s losses occurred as BTC dropped by four percent to $35,000 despite a generally favorable environment for risk assets. This followed an October inflation report that was less severe than expected, causing stocks to rise significantly and bond yields to decrease substantially. The decline affected the entire crypto market, with ETH experiencing a six percent fall to below $2,000.

Today’s activity differs from the trend of recent weeks, which was characterized by “short squeezes.” During this period, increasing asset prices led to forced liquidations of leveraged bets that predicted lower prices and incurred losses.