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Blockchain engineering firm ConsenSys hits $7bn valuation

By Will McCurdy

Blockchain engineering firm ConsenSys has hit a $7 billion valuation in its latest funding round.

The $450 million Series D funding round comes as the New York-based firm said its flagship product MetaMask hit 30 million users in January, a 42 per cent rise compared to November, when MetaMask reported 21 million users.

Founded in 2015, ConsenSys develop decentralised software services and applications that operate on the Ethereum blockchain.

The round was led by US investment firm ParaFi Capital, who were joined by new investors including Microsoft, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Anthos Capital, Sound Ventures, and C Ventures.

Previous ConsenSys investors also participated in the round, including Third Point, Marshall Wace, TRUE Capital Management, and UTA VC, United Talent Agency’s venture fund.

ConsenSys said the proceeds from the round will be converted to ETH to rebalance the ratio of ETH to USD-equivalents in line with ConsenSys’ treasury strategy.

In addition, ConsenSys said that its infrastructure tool Infura was now used by 430,000 developers.

Sullivan & Cromwell LLP acted as ConsenSys’ legal advisor in this transaction.

The news comes after a year in which the blockchain firm has attracted significant amounts of capital from established players in financial services.

In November, ConsenSy raised $200 million in a funding round backed by HSBC in November, which brought its valuation to $3.2 billion.

Joseph Lubin, chief executive at ConsenSys, said: "I think of ConsenSys as a broad and deep capabilities machine for the decentralized protocols ecosystem, able to rapidly capitalise at scale on fundamental new constructs that emerge, such as developer tooling, wallets, security audits, DeFi, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Layer-2 scaling, DAOs, and more."

Ben Forman, founder at ParaFi Capital, said: “As a long-time power user of ConsenSys’ products and services, ParaFi is thrilled to be an investor and thought partner as the company continues to operate at the forefront of decentralized infrastructure.”

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