By Alicia Maher
The massive success of Consensys’ latest funding round showed that many investors’ interest in Ethereum won’t wane soon. On Tuesday, Consensys (an Ethereum tech solution provider) revealed the successful completion of its Series D funding round in which it garnered nearly $460m, with the company now valued at about $7.5B.
More Institutional Investments
While top venture capitalists (such as Anthos Capital, Temasek, Vision Fund 2, Softbank, and Parafi capital) participated in this funding round, Parafi capital made the highest investment in this funding round. Other popular VCs from Consensys’ previous funding round are Marshall Wace, true capital management, and third point.
Institutional investors’ continued investment in Ethereum-built projects such as Web3 lends credence that the future of the world’s second-leading crypto remains bright. Part of the announcement highlighting the details of the fundraising completion states that Consensys will convert the newly-raised funds to ETH to “balance its ETH-USD equivalents as outlined in its treasury strategy.”
Consensys’ Treasury Strategy
The Ethereum tech solution provider maintains considerable amounts of stablecoins and ETH in its treasury, mainly used for refinancing its infrastructure. Also, the firm generates yields from several DeFi staking projects using these funds.
Consensys’ Chief Executive, Joseph Lubin, revealed that “we chose to accept virtual currencies and fiat during this funding round, but both are converted to ETH instantly. However, we only accept ETH donations during our next funding round. Thus, showing our full commitment to the current systemic shift in global financial infrastructure.”
Lubin further disclosed that Metamask (the company’s primary crypto wallet) will be upgraded later in the year and used to process funds received from the next funding round. Metamask’s user base has grown by 43% within four months of launch and now boasts over 30m active users per month.
Consensys also plans to enhance the broader adoption of its development suite (Infura) and facilitate NFT development. Infura is an Ethereum-built tool that runs nodes for Consensys users. Hence, some crypto players have argued that Infura’s mode of operation makes the Consensys platform non-decentralized because Infura is the central support system for the Consensys network.
The firm recently announced that it plans to increase its workforce to nearly 1,500 before this year ends. Consensys raised nearly $190m in its series c fundraising round last November. The firm raised about $66m in its April 2021 fundraising round, including investments from top institutional investors such as UBS and JPMorgan.
Ethereum Price Movement
While there is no doubt about a bright future for Ethereum, its price movements haven’t been encouraging in the last couple of months. It has been trading within a narrow range since late January. It is still 45% off its all-time high set last November.
Hence, it is no wonder that whales’ Ethereum transactions have decreased to a 12-month low (as it is with BTC and USDT) as of this writing. Many crypto analysts agree that the significant decline in whales’ transactions won’t result in a bear market. They believe that Whales are patiently watching for what’s likely to happen to the industry based on the recent economic outlook.