CoinList Chief Executive Officer, Graham Jenkin, said that the latest funding round was focused on deepening relationships with CoinList’s existing community rather than signing new venture capital. “Our community is truly global. While we have some great U.S. investors, our new investors are the most active users and partners in the regions where we are growing fastest – Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. We’re very excited to have them join us,” he stated.
Founded in 2017 and based in San Francisco, CoinList provides crypto projects with a platform to list their new tokens and raise funds from the public. The firm has facilitated token sales of notable projects such as Solana, Dapper Labs, and Filecoin. The company’s new unicorn status is a milestone achievement, as many venture companies continue to plough millions of dollars into the cryptocurrency sector which they believe is the future of money. Several other cryptocurrency and blockchain-focused companies have attained unicorn statuses this year, with valuations of $1 billion or more. Crypto exchanges Bitso and Mercado joined the league earlier this year, while derivatives platform FTX became a “decacorn” with a valuation of $18 billion. Also recently, NFT company Candy Digital closed $100 million in a Series A funding round, which increased its total valuation to $1.5 billion.
The past year has seen a rapid increase in the number of new projects launching their tokens, and this has been the major driver of CoinList’s growth, Graham Jenkin said. Keeping up with this growth and scaling its engineering systems and operations is its reason for raising the new funds, CoinList said, and according to the announcement, the funds “will be used to “scale our services and operations, better support our global community of early adopters, launch new products like CoinList Karma and CoinList Governance that boost protocol participation and continue to find the best new projects in crypto and help them and their communities succeed.”
The deal brings CoinList’s total funding to date to $120 million. Its last fundraising was in April 2018. The firm has no plans to raise more capital for at least the next 18 months, Graham Jenkin noted, adding that CoinList was profitable and may not raise funds again. “We’ve increased our KYC-approved user base 42x globally, 36x in the European Union, and 62x in Asia. CoinList now has users across 170+ countries,” Coinbase said regarding its performance. The company added that its exchange platform saw an increased monthly trading volume to $1 billion in 2021 and that assets staked on its platform now surpassed $3 billion, with over $130 million in staking rewards distributed so far. For its lending services, CoinList said it originated over $370 million in loans across multiple assets for ecosystem partners in its first year of running this business.
Also, as part of the deal, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Agman, Scott Silverman, will become a member of CoinList’s board.
