ShapeShift, the popular blockchain only asset exchange today announced the completion of its $10.4 million Series A funding Round. Led by international venture capital firm Earlybird, the financing is the largest ever for a non-fiat financial exchange.
Other new investors include Lakestar, Access Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, and Blockchain Capital. Prior ShapeShift backers FundersClub, Digital Currency Group and Erik Voorhees, the company’s founder and CEO, also participated.
The funds will be mainly used for further expansion of the team to keep up with its rapid growth and to release two new exchange products in 2017.
Christian Nagel, Parner at Earlybird said:
“ShapeShift’s team built a compelling crypto exchange engine which can be easily integrated into third-party products given its unique trustless design. It is uncommon to find the powerful combination of a noted serial Bitcoin entrepreneur, a senior team with deep industry knowledge, and a strong vision as the one present at ShapeShift.”
The funding, slated for team expansion, could not come at a better time as ShapeShift has set record-breaking exchange volume, soaring past 50,000 bitcoins per month.
Erik Voorhees, ShapeShift Founder, CEO, and Investor was quoted:
“When we started ShapeShift, a future world of natively digital assets was very theoretical, yet this world is quickly arriving; one in which millions of forms of digital value, from access keys to tokenized derivative contracts to video game items, will trade between people and machines all over the world, every second of every day. Just as information has gone natively digital, so too now goes value. Bitcoin taught a skeptical world how to do it, and the gold rush is on.”