Cryptocurrency conglomerate Digital Currency Group has raised $700 million in funding, including investments from Japanese multinational holding company SoftBank and the venture capital arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, CapitalG.
The fundraising deal helped push valuation of the crypto conglomerate to more than $10 billion, according to CNBC.
Digital Currency Group’s CEO Barry Silbert says that each participating investor will add value to the conglomerate in different ways, noting that SoftBank enjoys a worldwide footprint and the “ability to turbo-charge portfolio companies,” while CapitalG “brings Alphabet and Google’s expertise in data and consumer companies”.
“We were looking for the type of backers that could be, and hopefully will be, with us on this journey for the next couple of decades.”
Silbert says that while Digital Currency Group is currently profitable and will reach revenues of over $1 billion this year, going public is not currently under consideration.
“The typical reason companies do go public or rush to go public is to address liquidity, or to raise money for acquisitions, but we don’t have those pressures. I enjoy building this as a private company.”
Some of the crypto conglomerate’s subsidiaries include digital asset manager Grayscale, cryptocurrency publication CoinDesk, as well as cryptocurrency exchange and wallet Luno.
Digital Currency Group’s crypto asset portfolio includes Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Decentraland (MANA), Filecoin (FIL), Horizen (ZEN), Livepeer (LPT) and Zcash (ZEC).
In June, Silbert made his opinion on meme coins known when he condemned Dogecoin (DOGE), saying its market cap of billions of dollars is not justified.
“It is not worth $37 billion, sorry. If the entire value of something comes from a collective belief, and not usefulness or utility, then [DOGE] is overvalued.
There’s another name for that, but I’m not going there as I know it wasn’t created for that purpose or why most people loved it early on, like me.”
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