ConsenSys to buy more Ether, revamp MetaMask with $450M raise
Ethereum giant ConsenSys says it will use some of the $450 million raised in its recent Series D to beef up its Ether holdings.
The round, which included Microsoft, Singaporean investment firm Temasek Holdings, and Japan’s SoftBank, valued the company at $7 billion. That’s more than double what it was worth in November last year.
ConsenSys pledged to direct another portion of the funds to a major revamp of its browser-centric crypto wallet MetaMask this year, noted Bloomberg.
The Brooklyn-headquartered software firm now claims MetaMask boasts 30 million active users, although it hasn’t yet qualified exactly how it classifies that group.
On Twitter, ConsenSys’ billionaire founder and chief exec Joseph Lubin (also an Ethereum co-founder) described his plans to buy more Ether with the raise.
“We’ve long maintained a significant treasury of ETH, stablecoins and other crypto tokens, and we are actively using our own financial infrastructure to put these assets to work in DeFi protocols and via staking in anticipation of Ethereum’s merge to Proof of Stake,” he said.
ConsenSys founder says Ethereum will always be number one in DeFi
Lubin told Bloomberg that raising the fresh funds wasn’t particularly difficult. This was especially so given the company’s already close ties with tech incumbent Microsoft.
A number of Microsoft clients have previously gotten on board with ConsenSys’ enterprise blockchain platform Quorum. ConsenSys acquired Quorum from Wall Street bigwig JP Morgan in August 2020.
ConsenSys is currently facing an in-depth audit after 35 former employees demanded an investigation into a 2020 intellectual property deal.
The transaction saw JPMorgan take significant stakes in MetaMask and Ethereum node network Infura, another major ConsenSys product.
Read more: [ConsenSys lawsuit reveals JPMorgan owns critical Ethereum infrastructure]
Following the round, Lubin also dismissed suggestions that Ethereum might one day surrender its number-one status in the DeFi foodchain.
According to Lubin (via Bloomberg), this is “not even a remote possibility.” He says this is down to Ethereum’s more robust security when compared with the likes of Solana or other smaller blockchains.
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