Flowdesk, a three-year-old startup that makes a speciality of “market making as a service” for the crypto area, introduced on Thursday that it’s raised $50 million in a spherical led by Cathay Innovation.
The startup was based in Paris in 2020 and has already develop into a serious bridge between TradFi companies and the crypto world.
In December, Société Générale’s cryptocurrency division, SG Forge, made Flowdesk a market maker for its Euro-based stablecoin EUR CoinVertible. And earlier this month, Grayscale additionally named Flowdesk a liquidity provider for its newly accepted spot Bitcoin ETF, tasking it with shopping for and promoting Bitcoin to match the actions of the ETF’s market makers.
Flowdesk CEO Guilhem Chaumont mentioned the spate of recent spot Bitcoin ETFs and the optimistic buying and selling volumes seen to date have been encouraging—not only for TradFi companies new to the area however for crypto-native companies like his personal.
Flowdesk has now raised simply over $80 million, after a $30 million spherical in June 2022 from a gaggle that included Coinbase, Eurazeo, and Aglaé Ventures. Chaumont declined to reveal the corporate’s valuation.
Regardless of a number of the regulatory headwinds crypto confronted final yr, together with actions taken by the Securities and Alternate Fee against Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and different firms within the area, Chaumont mentioned he’s assured regulatory readability is on the best way—not simply within the U.S. however globally.
The agency is a registered digital asset service supplier in France, and Chaumont mentioned the corporate will use a part of the $50 million increase—along with reinvesting in tech and including to its 100-person workforce distributed throughout Paris, Singapore, and New York—to speed up the method of getting licenses for each jurisdiction by which it operates, together with the U.S. and Singapore.
“We are at the forefront of regulatory compliance and transparency,” he informed Fortune. “We think this is something that is very important and that needs to be brought to the crypto space to avoid the mistakes that have been made in the past.”
And to continue to grow, to maintain constructing belief in a unstable business with its share of skeptics.
“Crypto needs to step up,” Chaumont mentioned. “That’s how the bridge between crypto and TradFi will be made: Crypto will need to reach the standard of traditional finance.”
