Today Blockchain.com, the cryptocurrency exchange and wallet provider, announced a $120 million fundraising that includes Google Ventures alongside Moore Strategic Ventures (Louis Bacon), Kyle Bass, Access Industries, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others. Total funding to date exceeds $120 million.
The company shared some eye-popping figures. It has 65 million wallet users and claims that more than 28% of all Bitcoin transactions have used its wallet.
Bitcoin maximalists might latch on to the presence of Google. But Google Ventures has also invested in the likes of Uber and Slack.
Google Cloud is actively interested in public blockchains and distributed ledger technology (DLT), as first highlighted when it joined the governance board of Hedera. However, the company emphasized one of its main interests was hosting nodes on Google Cloud. That has been the driver behind some of its other relationships, including with EOS.
Meanwhile, U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which boasts 43 million users, is readying for an IPO, although it has not yet publicly released its prospectus.
Crypto derivatives exchange FTX started a futures market for the Coinbase shares. It gives a market capitalization of more than $95 billion, although that is likely an overestimate from crypto enthusiasts.
Nonetheless, the figure is not far short of Goldman Sachs’ market cap of $107 billion. In 2018 Coinbase raised a Series E of $300 million at a pre-money valuation of $7.7 billion.