Unchained Capital, a Bitcoin financial services company, raises $60 million. The Unchained Capital funding (Series B fundraising) comes approximately five months after the company reduced 15% of its workforce due to the pressures of the protracted crypto bear market.
Keynotes
- Unchained Capital, a Bitcoin financial services company, raises $60 million.
- About five months after the company lost 15% of its personnel, a Series B fundraising round headed by Valor Equity Partners came around.
In a news release issued on Tuesday, Unchained, a firm that offers financial services to Bitcoin owners, announced the closing of a $60 million funding. The Unchained Capital funding (Series B) round, was also joined by crypto asset-management giant NYDIG.
According to the statement, the $60 million in cash will reportedly be utilized to increase its client base and product selection.
“Using this fresh capital investment to expand our reach and suite of services, we hope to enable new entrants to Bitcoin to leapfrog centralized custodians into our safer collaborative custody model.”
CEO Unchained, Joe Kelly
Texas-based Unchained provides a collaborative custody system in which a user’s private key and private keys held by Unchained and other financial service providers jointly govern the user’s Bitcoin.
In order to provide the advantages of self-custody without the dangers associated with a single point of failure, such as a lost or stolen key, the model makes use of Bitcoin’s native multi-signature capabilities.
Through the use of multiple signers, multi-signature solutions do away with single points of failure and reduce counterparty risk. Risk is drastically reduced by multi-signature transactions since no one person can steal the money.
“Multisig is one of the most important technologies in the ecosystem that can be taken mainstream.” “It helps to protect individuals from loss and theft, two of the biggest issues for the industry.”
Joe Kelly
Unchained is unable to move or use customer funds independently, which are the kinds of behaviors that contributed to the demise of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. According to the company, it claims that it is now protecting over $2 billion in Bitcoin using thousands of keys.
The round was made available to investors in the middle of the first quarter of this year, and it reached its initial close in April with more than half of the funds raised. The additional funding will be used to increase the number of customers, enhance the current product line, and broaden the range of available products.
Given the severity of the cryptocurrency bear market, which is still in its early stages of recovery in 2023, it is a notably substantial capital raise. Due to the demands of the crypto winter, Unchained itself had to reduce its employment by 15% in the middle of November 2022.
“In the midst of market chaos, Unchained has emerged as a highly trusted provider of bitcoin custody and financial services through superior technology, risk management, regulatory compliance, and client service,”
Valor partner Vivek Pattipati
Additionally, Unchained provides bitcoin-collateralized loans, and since 2017 has created approximately $500 million in such loans. Multisig will certainly play a bigger role as more Bitcoin and crypto enthusiasts learn to take custody of their funds in the wake of cryptocurrency exchange collapses.
Featured image: unchained
Caleb is a technical writer at AlteBlock with over 2 years of experience in covering DeFi-related content such as crypto news, exchange reviews, and guides. He is also a Civil engineering graduate who can be found on-site when not writing an article.
