Sapphire and Tiger Global lead latest round furthering Blockdaemon’s mission to connect institutions to blockchains with one integration

January 26, 2022 04:34 PM Eastern Standard Time

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Blockdaemon, the leading institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure company for node management and staking, has announced that it has closed a Series C funding round of USD $207 million with a post-money valuation of $3.25 billion. The round was led by Sapphire and Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Boldstart Ventures, StepStone Group, Matrix Capital Management, and Lerer Hippeau. Galaxy Digital has also joined Blockdaemon’s cap table. The company is also announcing its partnership with Stakewise to augment liquid staking, as well as its own DeFi Fund to provide greater access to economic opportunity in the crypto ecosystem.

“Blockdaemon is committed to the future of decentralized finance, and to facilitate its adoption by legacy financial firms via secure , stable and regulatable on-and off ramps that help grow the entire blockchain ecosystem”

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As the leading infrastructure platform powering the blockchain economy, Blockdaemon closed out 2021 net income positive and added over 150 full time employees —the majority engineers — while also growing its international footprint in Germany and Singapore. With this next round of capital, Blockdaemon will accelerate strategic acquisitions, continue to enhance its full-stack product suite and launch a fund to reinvest earned assets, furthering its goal to provide access to economic opportunity globally.

Konstantin Richter, CEO and Founder of Blockdaemon, said, “Over the last 12 months Blockdaemon has seen massive growth across all metrics and raised substantial capital to continue bridging institutions onto protocols in a safe and secure manner. We remain committed to leading the way to overall network resilience and open source tooling development as this field of innovation continues to change the way value traverses the world.”

Blockdaemon is the foundational layer to the blockchain industry, enabling participants to transact, stake and earn via nodes in one simple interface with institutional-grade security, scalability and reliability. The company supports 50+ cutting edge blockchain networks including Eth2, Bitcoin, Solana, Terra, Cardano, Polkadot, Cosmos, SKALE, MobileCoin and the Lightning Network across over 70+ points of presence in the cloud and on bare metal servers globally through the Blockdaemon Marketplace. With an ecosystem-first mindset, Blockdaemon powers the institutional back-bone of transactions and yield earnings for tens of millions of registered users across the largest exchanges, custodians, investors and financial institutions in the world.

“The digital asset class is here to stay, especially as financial services and publicly traded companies continue to enter the fray. The challenge is that the growing demand for digital assets requires enterprise-grade infrastructure to enable secure, compliant and scalable participation in Web3/DeFi, which is why Blockdaemon's institutional node management and staking platform is so exciting to us at Sapphire," said Jai Das, President and Partner at Sapphire. “We’re thrilled to once again back founder and CEO Konstantin Richter and the Blockdaemon team, leading the company’s Series C, as they support the staking of billions of assets across +25 proof-of-stake blockchain networks with a bold vision of becoming the one-stop shop for institutional crypto yield generation."

Accelerating Blockdaemon’s Complete Node Stack and OS Ecosystem Initiative

This latest round accelerates the growth of Blockdaemon’s complete 'node stack' product suite and Open Source (OS) Ecosystem Initiative. For institutional clients, a wide range of blockchain services can be accessed through one interface —including transaction nodes, institutional staking, custodial APIs, liquidity options and high availability (HA) clusters. HA clusters are groups of computers that provide a more resilient and consistent service, quickly adding redundant machines to handle node failures, rises in demand or other unforeseen circumstances with ease.

An important growth area for blockchains, the OS Ecosystem Initiative will focus on improved blockchain node software, crypto libraries, public documentation and building tooling that increases the resilience among these business critical public systems. Blockdaemon’s cutting-edge node stack also includes integrated liquidity solutions, custodial APIs and NFTs for exchanges. Blockdaemon’s innovative product suite will continue to be enhanced following this round.

Blockdaemon Partners with StakeWise to Provide a KYC-Only Platform

To serve a growing demand for products with DeFi access from our institutional clients, Blockdaemon is proud to partner with StakeWise to build an institutional-grade liquid staking product on the Ethereum network. The partnership will create a KYC-based liquid staking solution for staking and leveraging derivative tokens, allowing clients with demanding compliance requirements to utilize staked capital for borrowing, lending, option writing, liquidity provision & waging on interest rates via other compliant DeFi applications. In the coming weeks, testnet access will be available.

Strategic Acquisitions and Investments Momentum

Blockdaemon’s continued focus on strategic acquisitions in the coming year follows its 2021 purchases of Lunie, a staking and governance platform for proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies, and Anyblock Analytics, an infrastructure platform, providing API, on-chain analytic tools, monitoring and innovative NFT offerings. Blockdaemon has also strategically invested in Obol Labs, a trust minimized staking protocol for public blockchain networks based on Distributed Validator Technology (DVT).

Blockdaemon Launches a DeFi Fund

To advance its mission to provide access to economic opportunity, Blockdaemon is establishing a DeFi Fund to reinvest earned assets into institutional grade DeFi offerings with an eye to creating CeFi solutions for its more regulatory aware customers, and to experiment with different flywheels. The funds will also be used to make structured investments in the crypto and blockchain ecosystem.

“As cryptocurrencies attract more interest from major financial institutions, these stakeholders will require secure, critical infrastructure to be effective participants”, said Nagraj Kashyap, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Blockdaemon as it expands the platform to fill much needed gaps and make the crypto ecosystem more viable and secure”.

“Tiger Global recently came on as a strategic investor of Blockdaemon and is delighted to join the Series C round that will take the company to the next level, helping it make strategic acquisitions and further invest in the DeFi ecosystem.” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global.

“Blockdaemon is committed to the future of decentralized finance, and to facilitate its adoption by legacy financial firms via secure , stable and regulatable on-and off ramps that help grow the entire blockchain ecosystem,” added Konstantin Richter, CEO and Founder of Blockdaemon.

About Blockdaemon

Blockdaemon is the leading independent blockchain node infrastructure to stake, scale, and deploy nodes with institutional-grade security and monitoring. Supporting 50+ cutting edge blockchain networks in the cloud and on bare metal servers globally, Blockdaemon is used by exchanges, custodians, crypto platforms, financial institutions and developers to connect commercial stakeholders to blockchains. We power the blockchain economy by simplifying the process of deploying nodes and creating scalable enterprise blockchain solutions via APIs, high availability clusters, auto-decentralization and auto-healing of nodes. For more information, please visit https://blockdaemon.com/.

About Sapphire

Sapphire is a leading global technology-focused venture capital firm with more than $8.8 billion in AUM and team members across Austin, London, New York, Palo Alto and San Francisco. For more than two decades, Sapphire has partnered with visionary management teams and venture funds to help scale companies of consequence. Since its founding, Sapphire has invested in more than 170 companies globally (b) resulting in more than 30 IPOs and 45 acquisitions. (c) The firm’s investment strategies — Sapphire Ventures, Sapphire Partners and Sapphire Sport — are focused on scaling companies and venture funds, elevating them to become category leaders. Sapphire’s Portfolio Growth team of experienced operators delivers a strategic blend of value-add services, tools and resources designed to support portfolio company leaders as they scale. To learn more about Sapphire, visit: https://sapphireventures.com.