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Report: Crypto Financial Services Firm Matrixport Seeks $100 Million in Funding

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Crypto lender Matrixport seeks $100M funding despite lending crisis

November 25, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Crypto lender Matrixport seeks 0M funding despite lending crisis

Bitmain

Bitmain-backed crypto lender Matrixport is the other half of a new funding round targeting a $100 million raise.

Matrixport, the cryptocurrency firm founded by Bitmain co-founder Wu Jihan, is in the process of raising $100 million funding despite the ongoing crypto market crisis.

Lead investors have already committed $50 million for Matrixport’s new funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported on Nov. 25. The deal has yet to be finalized as Matrixport is still looking for investors for the other half of the round.

We're excited and look forward to engaging with participants, on similar terms, in the other half of the #funding round.

Appreciate the trust and confidence our investors continue have in Team #Matrixport.@business https://t.co/DqQhsYucUy
— Matrixport (@realMatrixport) November 25, 2022

According to the company, the new round is part of Matrixport’s usual funding agenda. “Matrixport routinely engages with key stakeholders as part of its normal course of business, including investors keen to participate and enable our vision as a digital assets financial services provider,” the firm’s public relations head Ross Gan said.

Matrixport’s new funding comes a year after the firm conducted a $100 million Series C funding round conducted in August 2021, becoming a unicorn with a $1 billion valuation.

The fundraise was led by major global venture capital firms, including DST Global, C Ventures and K3 Ventures. Other contributors in the round included major industry investors like Tiger Global, Qiming Venture Partners, CE Innovation Capital, A&T Capital, alongside existing investors like Polychain, Dragonfly Capital, Lightspeed, IDG Capital and others.

According to Bloomberg data, Matrixport handles $5 billion of trades each month and has tens of billions of dollars of assets under management and custody. The firm reportedly employs close to 300 people.

Established in February 2019, Matrixport is one of the largest cryptocurrency lenders in Asia, offering a wide range of crypto services, including trading and custody. The company also offers cryptocurrency and stablecoin loans, as well as zero-cost loans with a 0% interest rate and liquidation protection.

Matrixport is one of few crypto lending platforms that appear to have not been affected by the ongoing crisis of cryptocurrency lending. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, some of the biggest crypto lending platforms including Celsius and BlockFi have faced major issues this year due to the ongoing bear market and the associated crisis of cryptocurrency lending.

Wu’s crypto company also said that it wasn’t too much affected by the ongoing FTX contagion, reporting a few issues due to the crash of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange. On Nov. 11, Matrixport reported that 79 of its users suffered losses in the aftermath of FTX issues, adding that the affected products included the BTC Fixed Income Products and Victoria BTC Fund Products.

“We would need to emphasize that Matrixport’s products are subject to strict segregation from one another so that a single impacted product will not affect the other products as the underlying asset and fund flow are segregated,” the firm stated.

Bitcoin mining firm Bitdeer could delay public offering to 2023

November 2, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Bitmain

An SEC filing stated Safari Group shareholders could vote to give the company the option to extend the Bitdeer deadline up to four times until December 2023.

Bitdeer, a crypto mining firm spun off from China-based mining manufacturer Bitmain, may see its public offering on the Nasdaq delayed a year depending on a vote from shareholders of the Blue Safari Group Acquisition Corp.

In a Nov. 2 Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Blue Safari said it will be holding a shareholding meeting before the end of 2022 to vote on whether to extend the deadline of its deal with Bitdeer. The mining firm announced in November 2021 that it had entered into a definitive merger agreement with Blue Safari in order to go public through a special purpose acquisition company in the United States.

The SEC filing stated the shareholders could give the company the option to extend the deadline up to four times until December 2023, as well as move the meeting to a later date if there was an insufficient number of votes. If successful, the two firms could merge under the name Bitdeer Technologies Group for a listing on the Nasdaq.

“If the Charter Amendment proposal is not approved and we have not consummated a business combination by the Current Termination Date, we will (a) cease all operations except for the purpose of winding up, (b) as promptly as reasonably possible but not more than ten business days thereafter, subject to lawfully available funds therefor, redeem 100% of the public shares,” said the SEC filing. “In the event we wind up, there will be no distribution from the Trust Account with respect to our rights to receive ordinary share upon the consummation of an initial business combination and the rights will expire worthless.”

Founded and under the leadership of former Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu, Bitdeer facilitates cloud-mining services through U.S.-based data centers operated in Tennessee, Washington, and Texas. As of Oct. 30, the firm reported it was mining roughly 900 Bitcoin (BTC) daily.

Following the crypto market downturn in May, many crypto firms announced the termination of deals. Israel-based cryptocurrency exchange eToro was valued at roughly $10 billion as of March 2021 and was seemingly on track for a SPAC merge announced in July it had terminated its agreement with Fintech V. The exchange was reportedly considering a private funding round of up to $1 billion.

Cointelegraph reached out to Bitdeer, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

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Jihan Wu’s Matrixport Raises $100 Million — Singapore Startup Joins Growing List of Crypto Unicorns

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Former Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu raises fresh capital for new crypto unicorn

August 2, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Matrixport, a part of Jihan Wu's Bitmain exit strategy, is now valued at over $1 billion in just 2 years.

Jihan Wu became a prominent name in crypto after co-founding Bitmain Technologies in 2013 and taking it public by 2018. His latest venture, Matrixport, raised new capital to stand at a unicorn-level of $1 billion in valuation.

With the participation of large venture capital firms including Tiger Global, DST Global, C Ventures and K3 Ventures, the Series C funding of Matrixport raised over $100 million. As a crypto-financial services company, Matrixport tries to implement a Wall Street-like structure to the vast cryptocurrency ecosystem.

According to the CEO of Matrixport and former Bitmain investor, Ge Yuesheng, the company currently is home to high net-worth individuals “who have a wide range of expectations of risk and return.” The firm reported to hold over $10 billion of client assets as of March 2021 and it intends to go public "in three to five years" as an exit strategy for its investors.

As reported earlier by Cointelegraph, Matrixport was founded by Wu following governmental resistance against Bitmain’s IPO launch back in 2019. Last year, the startup’s revenue peaked at $7 to $8 million and had reportedly pitched to double the investor’s money by 2020 during its last investment cycle.

Citing the stringent policies against crypto innovation, Cointelegraph had reported Wu’s point of view towards taking out “bad actors out of the industry” and healing the industry’s reputation. Before Wu’s exit from Bitmain, the company was estimated to be worth $12 billion in August 2019.

Matrixport currently supports purchasing the most popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), XRP, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC) and Tether (USDT) against fiat currency.

Jihan Wu

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