On Tuesday, the Boston-based crypto exchange and wallet company, Circle, announced that they closed a $110m Series E funding round that values the startup at nearly $3B.
More billionaire talk — snooooze-fest…
But, the funding round was led by China-based crypto mining company Bitmain, whose investment earned them a partnership with Circle to launch a “US dollar coin” that will be regulated and backed by cold, hard, government currency, AKA a stable coin.
A major step in Bitmain’s vision of ‘private central banks’
Founded in 2013, Bitmain has become the world’s largest maker of bitcoin mining rigs, earning a reported $4B in profits last year.
As recently as March, Bitmain co-CEO Jihan Wu made appearances at major US conferences where, according to Coindesk, he promised to back high-tech alternatives to central banking, and Circle’s so-called “USD-C token” could be the stable asset to get them there.
The stable coin has recently become the white whale of the crypto world, with companies in droves attempting to make crypto less volatile by putting actual reserves behind it (hence “stable”), and make the conversion of crypto assets into fiat currency more efficient.
Now, Bitmain can add VC to their resume
The fact that Bitmain essentially just became a VC over night spells big competition throughout the industry, but also a positive step on the whole for an industry still widely pooh-poohed by many old school economists.
By creating an investment arm, and putting money back into crypto, Bitmain continues to blaze the trail of crypto influence.
