ShapeShift is the world’s leading instant exchange for Bitcoin digital currency and other blockchain assets with an exchange volume of more than 50,000 Bitcoins (CHF50 million) per Month. The Zug-based start-up today announced the completion of its $10.4 million Series A funding round led by Earlybird and joined by Lakestar.
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 groundbreaking exchange products in 2017.
With the market cap of blockchain tokens now in the tens of billions of dollars, ShapeShift helps customers convert between them, for example exchanging a token on the Bitcoin blockchain for a token on the Ethereum blockchain. The digital asset exchange has grown an average of 48 percent per month since launching just under three years ago. The company operates under a strict “no fiat” policy, meaning only legitimate blockchain-based assets (no government money) are permitted on the platform.
“ShapeShift's team built a compelling crypto exchange engine which can be easily integrated into third-party products given its unique trustless design,” said Christian Nagel, Partner at Earlybird. “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.”
“When we started ShapeShift, a future world of natively digital assets was very theoretical,” said Erik Voorhees, Founder and CEO of ShapeShift. “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.”
The ShapeShift platform currently supports more than 40 leading digital currencies and assets, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Litecoin, Augur’s Rep token, and Monero. Any of these assets may be sold for any other, thus over 1,080 direct trading pairs are supported, more than any other blockchain-based exchange.
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