By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 26th, 2024
CapitalG founder and top executive David Lawee said backing DCG was a way of backing a “potential winner in crypto financial services.”
The foremost financial institution, Digital Currency Group, the parent company of the largest Bitcoin Trust in the world, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), has officially commenced the sale of its shares to SoftBank and Google’s venture capital arm, CapitalG. Following the funding round, the valuation of Digital Currency Group went to more than $10 billion.
According to an announcement by the company regarding the secondary round of the sales on Monday, the $700 million deal was led by SoftBank and included other top investors like CapitalG, Ribbit Capital, GIC Capital and others.
Interestingly, before the current sales in which existing investors are selling their shares to new investors, the company’s valuation has always been a mystery to the public.
What has remained in the public domain was that at its initial launching round, it was able to raise around $25 million in primary capital. However, since then, little to nothing has been known about its valuation.
One of the conglomerate’s subsidiaries, Grayscale Investments, is undoubtedly the world’s biggest digital asset manager. The subsidiary has over $50 billion assets under its management and it was recently in the news when it revealed that it would be working to convert its popular Bitcoin trust into an exchange-traded fund (ETF).
Apart from GBTC, the company also has other trusts in assets like Ethereum, Litecoin, Cardano, some popular DeFi protocols as well as the fact that it owns Genesis, an institutional lending firm plus Coindesk, a renowned crypto news website.
Speaking on the development, the group’s founder and CEO, Barry Silbert, says the firm is the first choice of investors looking to invest in crypto.
He said:
“We’re the best proxy for investing in this industry. We were looking for the type of backers that could be, and hopefully will be with, with us on this journey for the next couple of decades.”
He continued that investors like CapitalG for instance would be bringing the expertise of Google in data and consumer companies while his firm would be relying on Softbank’s global outlook and its ability to push portfolio companies to new heights.
An interesting aspect of this new investment into DCG by these venture capital firms is an indication of their growing willingness to look beyond investing alone in Bitcoin in the crypto industry.
CapitalG founder and top executive David Lawee said backing DCG was a way of backing a “potential winner in crypto financial services.”
“When I think back to the nineties, very few companies I met still exist – it’s very hard to evolve as quickly as technology evolves – you need to be a pretty nimble company to take advantage of it. DCG has a lot of flexibility to make investments and to get into new businesses,” said he.
