On January 7, 2021 Bitcoin’s price crossed 40,000 for the first time and the next day on January 8, 2021 Bitcoin traded with the historical record price as high as $41,973 while the next day Price briefly fell as much as 26% but pared losses to trade around $33,400 whipping $200 billion of trade value from the cryptocurrency market in 24 hours according to American Financial media.
We hope ethereum competitor Solana enjoyed its 24-hours in the fourth position on Forbes’ list of largest fundraising rounds in crypto and blockchain history, because cryptocurrency hardware wallet producer Ledger’s $380 million round announced this morning already knocked them down a peg.
Paris-based Ledger has sold more than 3 million hardware wallets in 190 countries to date, and it has more than 1.5 million monthly users on Ledger Live, a mobile companion to the Ledger hardware wallet which allows users to manage and store their assets.
The jaw-dropping fundraising announcements made by Solana and Ledger this week illustrate the movement of funds into the crypto and blockchain sector, despite bitcoin’s collapse near $30,000 after hitting an all-time-high of $64,671 over the Spring.
The payments and treasury infrastructure provider best known as one of the principal developers of the $22 billion stablecoin USDC raised $440 million from a large group of institutional and strategic investors.
The world’s leading bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer, Bitmain also operates Antpool, one of the top bitcoin mining pools, accounting for 13% of bitcoin’s network hash, or computational, power.
Ledger produces hardware wallets, dedicated devices used to store digital assets, and a companion platform, Ledger Live, which allows users to manage and store their assets.
Rumors of BlockFi’s potential IPO started to circulate last July following reports of a job opportunity, part of which involved helping the company go public.
To date, Solana has facilitated more than 19 billion on-chain transitions and hosts a range of decentralized products including Serum, a decentralized exchange founded by billionaire FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
The Vancouver-based startup is best known as the developer of NBA Top Shot, an NFT marketplace for basketball video highlights or “moments.” The project, which has already surpassed the $500 million mark in trading volume, is largely responsible for the boom of non-fungible tokens , essentially digital proofs of ownership trackable on a blockchain.
Unlike its counterparts controlled by third parties, these wallets give users full control over their private keys that represent ownership of crypto assets.
In February 2020, the crypto venture of ICE announced the acquisition of Bridge2 Solutions, provider of loyalty programs, to power Bakkt’s one-stop shop retail platform.
On March 19, the company was fined $6.5 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over allegations of false transactions reporting and wash trading between 2015 and 2018 on its GDAX platform, later rebranded as Coinbase Pro.
These include the Bitso App that lets users buy, sell, send or receive bitcoin and 8 other cryptocurrencies; Bitso Alpha, a professional-grade crypto trading platform; and Bitso Business, a suite of cross-border products for local enterprises.
Its one-stop blockchain open service BaaS platform, FiLoop, is used by some of the largest banks in China, including China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, and China Merchants Bank, according to the company.