Today Valkyrie Investments announced an $11 million strategic funding round that included BNY Mellon, Wedbush Financial Services and Coinbase Ventures, amongst others.
Valkyrie has a number of Bitcoin-related ETFs, including Bitcoin futures, Bitcoin mining and companies with Bitcoin balance sheet exposure. It’s one of the contenders to launch a Bitcoin spot ETF, but so far the SEC has rejected all applicants.
It also runs a DeFi hedge fund and manages several investment trusts for cryptocurrency protocols such as Bitcoin, Zilliqa and Avalanche. Zilliqa Capital participated in the round. Other named investors include C-Squared Ventures, Clearsky, Belvedere Strategic Capital, and SenaHill Partners.
In February, the company said assets under management were more than $1 billion and two months later, the startup was accepted into the BNY Mellon accelerator program.
Meanwhile, BNY Mellon announced it would start to provide custody for digital assets in February last year. This March, it said it was responsible for the custody of the backing assets for the USDC stablecoin.
BNY Mellon has made a series of investments in the digital assets sector, including as part of last month’s $105 million funding of trading infrastructure startup Talos. It has also invested in digital asset custody technology provider Fireblocks, analytics and compliance firm Chainalysis and trading data startup Coin Metrics.
