ShapeShift Raises $10.4 Million in Series A Funding

The popular crypto-to-crypto exchange platform, ShapeShift has announced the successful completion of its latest Series A funding round for a sum of $10.4 million. The investment in Switzerland-based platform founded by Erik Voorhees was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and saw participation from the likes of Lakestar, FundersClub, Blockchain Capital, Pantera Capital and Access Venture Partners.

With the latest investment round, the total amount of funds raised by the company currently stands at $12.8 million. With the new influx of funds, the company intends to use it to expand the workforce and focus on the platform’s growth. ShapeShift already supports about 36 major cryptocurrencies including the likes of Bitcoin, Ether, and Dash. The instant conversion facility offered by the platform is popular among the cryptocurrency community, and the services are integrated by many crypto-platforms as well.

According to reports, ShapeShift will soon be launching two new exchange products later this year. The founder, Erik Voorhees explained ShapeShift’s journey through time to a startup and tech news portal. The publication quoted him saying

““When we started ShapeShift, a future world of natively digital assets was very theoretical. Yet this world is quickly arriving; one in which millions of forms of digital value, from access keys to tokenized derivative contracts to video game items, will trade between people and machines all over the world, every second of every day. Just as information has gone natively digital, so too now goes value. Bitcoin taught a skeptical world how to do it, and the gold rush is on.”

Voorhees started the platform in 2014, after selling SatoshiDice — a cryptocurrency gambling website in 2013 for 126,315 bitcoins worth $11.47 million at that time. Shapeshift has grown over the past three years and now the platform manages about 50,000 bitcoins a month. The platform stands apart from rest of the cryptocurrency trading platforms and exchanges as it follows a peer-to-peer approach enabling buyers and sellers to fulfill each other’s orders than having an entirely centralized setup.

The success of ShapeShift has caught up with the latest crypto-platforms as well. Many of them continue to implement ShapeShift’s services into their crowdsale and ICO campaigns.

Ref: Venture Beat | Image: NewsBTC

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