Crypto exchange FTX is now worth $18 billion after closing $900 million in a Series B funding round.
Over 60 investors participated in the funding round, including Sequoia Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and the Paul Tudor Jones family. It is the first large funding round for FTX, a two-year-old company.
FTX says that the newly raised funds will allow it to expand its product offerings and user base.
The exchange currently caters to over 1 million users and facilitates an average of over $10 billion in daily trading volume.
Last year, FTX raised funds in a Series A funding round and has since grown its revenue by 75 times.
In an interview on CNBC, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried says FTX is focused on moving the industry forward.
“It was really just a lot of small things put together, a lot of decisions that we’ve made around how to build a product, trying to be as responsive as we can to customers, to regulators, to counterparties. And honestly, from our perspective, it sometimes feels like the world is just going sort of in slow motion around us, and that we’re going at about an average speed by our standards…
We have a fully rebuilt risk and margin system that lets users cross margin everything on the platform in a really simple manner. We’ve built out a ton of different products, and a large fraction of these are new innovative releases in the space. We’ve tried to push forward with what our customers want and deliver that to them.
And one thing I’ll say is that we have been catering particularly to the power user. But it’s easier, once you have that, to build out a product for the consumer than the other way around.”
Featured Image: Shutterstock/Jurik Peter