By Bentley Kapoor (India)
After they had raised fresh capital of $50 million, crypto lender BlockFi has successfully raised almost $100 million in the last 12 months. The latest round was announced last Thursday, a Series C and it was led by Morgan Creek Digital of Anthony Pompliano. This is the second largest round that was conducted by the VC firm and the list is topped by $103 million Series C of Figure. Currently, there are $1.5 billion crypto assets that can be found on BlockFi’s lending platform. According to the company’s CEO Zac Prince, they are generating a little less than $10 million in revenue.
He said that they are still adding personnel and keeping equity capital stable in order to expand geographically as quickly as possible. The CEO also expects to introduce the first Bitcoin rewards cards by the year end in the market and a more public rollout within next year. Prince stated that bringing a credit card to the market meant that they had to work with a number of partners. He said that some hadn’t been able to handle the transition from being a fully in-office company to being completely remote as smoothly as they had been able to manage.
Another participant in the Series C included Valar Ventures of Peter Thiel, who was the leading investor in BlockFi’s A and B rounds. Other participants are Castle Island Ventures, Avon Ventures, CMT Digital, Kenetic Capital, two unnamed university endorsements, Purple Arch Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, HashKey, National Basketball Association player Matthew Dellavedova, Michael Antonov and SCB 10X. Dellavedova, who plays as the guard for Cleveland Cavaliers, said that he had learned about crypto for the first time in 2017 and Morgan Creek’s Pompliano had introduced him to BlockFi later on. In the last three to four years, he has been making angel investments, but BlockFi is the first crypto play he has made, other than holding a little ether and Bitcoin.
He stated that he was still a rookie in crypto, but it has the capability of providing an interesting interest rate. Sterling Witzke, a repeat investor, who is also a partner at Winklevoss Capital, said that BlockFi’s key selling point is its ability to appeal to both institutional and retail customers. He said that they were looking forward to support the lending platform’s team when they launch their next iteration of products and continue to work on mainstream adoption. This would help in cementing cryptocurrency at the core when it comes to the future of finance.
According to Prince, even after the bitcoin crash in March, BlockFi continued their lending operation whereas other lending firms decided to take a short break. Just like Celsius and Genesis, March turned out to be a good month for crypto lending at BlockFi because of the primary borrowers of the sector i.e. market makers and proprietary traders. He said that even though there had been a downward trend in interest rates for crypto loans backed by fiat, the demand for bitcoin-backed loans is still high.
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