Today Ethereum development house ConsenSys announced it raised $200 million at a $3.2 billion valuation. The investors are Marshall Wace, Daniel Loeb’s Third Point, ParaFi Capital, Think Investments, Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital, Spartan Group, DeFiance Capital, Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, and HSBC.
The news was previously rumored last month.
ConsenSys plans to add 400 staff and double down on the success of its self custody wallet Metamask with 21 million users and Infura its development suite.
“The ‘age of silos’ and ‘trusted third parties’ (h/t @punk6529) is giving way to the ‘age of community and collaboration’ enabled by an automated, objective, trust foundation and a decentralized finance ecosystem. The paradigm shift to a world running on decentralized protocols is in full gear,” said ConsenSys CEO and founder Joe Lubin.
“The pace of adoption is now so rapid that we’ve more than doubled many of our core KPIs since this deal was struck over the summer.”
The latest investment follows a $65 million funding announced in April, including JP Morgan, Mastercard, and UBS. At that stage, Metamask had three million users.
This isn’t the first time that ConsenSys has targeted a funding round of this size. It previously did so in 2019 but was unsuccessful. However, since then, it split off ConsenSys Investments and is a far more focused organization around its tools such as Metamask, Infura and Truffle, and enterprise blockchain offering Quorum. However, according to Coindesk, that restructuring could result in legal action.
The Quorum brand and technology was acquired from JP Morgan last August, with the brand also used for the enterprise version of Hyperleder Besu. Today ConsenSys also mentioned that Quorum is now being used in ten central bank digital currency projects. Last week it was one of the winners of the Singapore Global CBDC Challenge.
