Today Ethereum development house ConsenSys announced it raised a $65 million funding round from JP Morgan, Mastercard, UBS as well as several blockchain companies such as Protocol Labs (Filecoin), Maker, Fenbushi, Alameda Research (FTX) and others.
Last year JP Morgan transferred its Quorum enterprise blockchain to ConsenSys. In addition to this, ConsenSys also has an enterprise blockchain consulting arm and the ConsenSys Mesh investment arm, which holds tokens in numerous blockchain startups.
“Enterprise Ethereum is a key infrastructure on which we and our partners are building payment and non-payment applications to power the future of commerce,” said Raj Dhamodharan, EVP at Mastercard.
But the core of ConsenSys revolves around the public Ethereum blockchain, where founder and CEO Joe Lubin was also a founder, its first major investor, and hence a significant ETH token holder. Thus the aim is to build enterprise grade infrastructure around Ethereum where DeFi and other blockchain applications can flourish.
Ultimately the goal is for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and traditional finance to converge on the public blockchain. Which might be interpreted as politically correct speak for disruption.
“We are proud to partner with preeminent financial firms alongside leading crypto companies to further converge the centralized and decentralized financial domains at this particularly exciting time of growth for ConsenSys and the entire industry,” said ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin.
ConsenSys has built a suite of tools to help users, developers and empower DeFi. These include Codefi (digital assets, payments, staking), Diligence (compliance), Infura (infrastructure), MetaMask (wallet), and Truffle (development tools).
The company is known for its three million user MetaMask wallet, which since last October has a business model taking 0.875% of transactions where users choose to use MetaMask for token swaps. Compared to other decentralized exchanges, that’s not cheap. To date, this has powered almost $2 billion in token swap transactions yielding more than $17 million in fees. By comparison, low-cost Uniswap powered $7 billion in transactions last week, but it had a massive head start on MetaMask.
Other ConsenSys investors included The LAO, CMT Digital, Greater Bay Area Homeland Development Fund, Quotidian Ventures, and Liberty City Ventures. ConsenSys was keen to point out that some of the investment was paid using stablecoins. Given several of the investors such as Alamada Research, are major blockchain players, it would have been odd to wire a transfer.
