HSBC and CoinBase Ventures invest in Blockchain company Consensys

ConsenSys has closed a $200 million USD financing round, bringing its valuation to $3.2 billion USD. Among the new investors include HSBC and CoinBase Ventures. In addition other investors such as Marshall Wace, Third Point, ParaFi Capital, and Think Investments contributed to the round. New partners included Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital, Spartan Group, DeFiance Capital, Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, and HSBC. Sullivan & Cromwell LLP acted as ConsenSys’ legal advisor in this transaction.

The recent Funding will support the rapid expansion of MetaMask and Infura’s industry leading products as well as the addition of 400 new roles across its products and services.

ConsenSys’ mission is to unlock the collaborative power of communities by making Web3 universally easy to use, access, and build on. MetaMask is the primary way a global user base of approximately 21 million monthly active users — a 38x increase from 2020 — interacts with a universe of approximately 3,700 unique Web3 applications. Web3 allows creators to capture the true value of their work and communities to organize in real time, largely unfettered by borders. These applications include NFT marketplaces, play-to-earn games, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, and metaverse worlds.

As the leading self-custodial wallet, MetaMask acts as a digital authority manager for Web3 — only permitting websites and apps to access data that a user consents to. MetaMask’s in-app swap feature has enabled more than $10 billion USD in peer-to-peer token swapping. Additionally, MetaMask now supports Ethereum-compatible Layer 2 networks such as Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, BSC, Celo, Avalanche, and NEAR/Aurora, which represents more than 90% of global smart contract network volume. An institution-compliant version of Metamask, MetaMask Institutional integrates custody and compliance solutions that enable organizations to access and engage in DeFi. ConsenSys is also ramping up its efforts to drive NFT adoption for artists, content creators, brands, rights owners, game publishers, and leagues.

ConsenSys’ developer tools and infrastructure are anchored by Infura, which is used by 350k developers, including MetaMask and leading DeFi and NFT platforms. Developers choose Infura because of its industry leading scale and performance, best-in-class documentation, and resources to help developers spend less time on infrastructure and more time building. ConsenSys is increasingly integrating its other products with Infura to support the entire development lifecycle, such as Truffle (4.7 million developers) for writing and testing smart contracts, Diligence for securing smart contracts with hands-on code audits and automated testing tools, and Customer Success for tech support. ConsenSys Quorum Blockchain Service offers a fully managed Ethereum blockchain service to enterprises. ConsenSys Quorum is already in use by 10 different Central Bank Digital Currency projects around the world. ConsenSys’ protocol and R&D engineers are main drivers of Ethereum’s upcoming merge which will bring the more energy efficient and scalable Proof of Stake consensus system to Ethereum.

Joseph Lubin, Founder & CEO of ConsenSys and Co-creator of Ethereum said, “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. 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. We are honored to partner with some of the top financial and strategic investors from both traditional and next generation economies to accelerate the realization of Web3. As our technology crosses into the mainstream, we are already seeing the transformation of how larger and larger cohorts of builders, users, artists, and enterprises live and work.”

Amit Rajpal, Partner and CEO Asia at Marshall Wace said, “We are excited to be investing in ConsenSys. The consumer, developer, and enterprise ecosystems for Defi and NFT applications are building exponentially and blockchain technology companies, like ConsenSys, which have multi-faceted technology offerings are in position to be the access point to this universe. We particularly look forward to working with Joe and his team to enhance their presence in the Asian region where adoption rates are rising rapidly.”