KuCoin worth $10 billion as it secures $150 million in pre-Series B investment
Crypto exchange KuCoin has raised US$150 million in its first financing round in four years. Despite the ongoing nosedive of the overall digital currency market, a pre-Series B funding round led by Jump Crypto brought the platform’s valuation to $10 billion. Other participants included IDG Capital, Circle Ventures, and Matrix Partners.
KuCoin chief executive Johnny Lyu told TechCrunch that “Web3 is about openness, and we want to build KuCoin into an open ecosystem and an open system needs to bring many friends on board. The world of crypto is so new that we want to make sure we can leverage all sources of information to guide our decision-making, and these prominent investors can keep us updated on the latest trends.”
The newly raised capital will allow for the expansion of KuCoin’s trading services and Web3 ventures, including its crypto wallet, GameFi, Defi, and NFT projects. The platform is developing these features via KuCoin Labs and KuCoin Ventures, in a bid to broaden its infrastructure and deploy resources to deepen a fully decentralized ecosystem.
The funding will also go towards the expansion of KuCoin’s 18 million users as well as the enchantment of security and risk management systems.
According to Tak Fujishima, Head of Asia for Jump Crypto, “KuCoin provides a comprehensive platform of crypto services to a global audience. We are pleased to support the company as it continues to grow and expand its offerings in futures and margin trading, lending, staking and passive yield generation to support the growth of Web 3.0 and the crypto markets.”
In November of 2018, the firm secured $20 million in Round A funding led by Singapore’s Vertex Ventures. At present, KuCoin is the fifth largest on the market, competing with the likes of Binance, Coinbase, FTX, and Crypto.com.
Responding to the news, the platform’s native crypto, the KuCoin Token, saw a minor jump before dipping again in line with the overall market. At the time of writing, KCS is priced at US$13.91 with a 24-hour trading volume of US$18,689,371.