Crypto Market Grows, Jihan Wu’s New Firm in $1bln Valuation

The second adventure of Jihan Wu after leaving as the co-founder of mining chip company Bitmain Technologies has reported closing a Series C funding round with a valuation of over US$1 billion in two years.

The $129 million raised to date puts Matrixport, which was established in 2019, in a position to further invest in research and development for innovative product offerings and security while optimising for an even greater user experience. 

The funds will also be used to support Matrixport’s global expansion as well as to secure licenses to operate in more jurisdictions, the company adds in a public statement.

The Singapore-based start-up has held over $10 billion of client assets under management and custody as at March 2021 and recorded $5 billion in monthly transactions across all product lines as it seeks to allow more users to embrace its cryptocurrency financial services platform from around the globe.

Prepping for institutional investment surge? 

With the latest being Germany’s financial watchdog BaFin granting German funds aimed at institutional investors to be able to allocate up to a fifth of their assets to cryptocurrencies, more institutional investors and wealth managers have reportedly been showing interest in the crypto space. 

A recent survey of investors from the U.S, U.K., France, Germany and the UAE shows that 82% of them expect to increase their exposure to crypto and digital assets by 2023. With regulations on the horizon and the crypto market value hitting $2 trillion for the first time in April, the number of individual users seems to be growing too.

A preparedness for an upsurge in demands could benefit Matrixport which considers itself more than a gateway to the crypto economy but a platform for both institutional customers and individuals to easily get more from their crypto beyond trading. 

And with Wu at the helm, his industry experience may be quite valuable. 

“I always believe an open and permissionless blockchain ecosystem is the bedrock of a new financial network that will benefit a large part of the world’s population,” says Wu, a co-founder and chairman of Matrixport. “As a result, there will be hundreds of trillions of value created, stored and transferred on this new financial network.” 

For MX Kuok, the Managing Partner of K3 Ventures, one of the investors in the funding round,  Matrixport’s first movers edge for a well-curated suite of innovative crypto investment offerings is key.  

Why Matrixport’s valuation

As with other industries, the valuation of a crypto company – measuring a company’s actual elements and its competitive position for future financial expectations – helps to identify where its value lies.

A company valuation comes handy to get a company’s true asset value (including stock market value) – not estimate – in the event the business is to be put on sale or for a better negotiation when sought to be acquired by a larger one. It also helps when seeking additional investors to fund company growth or save it from a financial disaster. 

While Matrixport straightens out its valuation objective, it continues with its platform’s approach of empowering crypto natives, institutional clients and the large community of first-time users who it says are just embarking on their crypto investing journey.

The company has the backing of other top funding partners like DST Global among others as well as earlier investors such as Lightspeed, Polychain, Dragonfly Capital, CMT Digital and IDG Capital.