Crypto Wallet Ledger Seeks an Additional $100 Million in Funding
- The Ledger website indicates that the company has sold more than 3 million hardware wallets since starting operations in 2014.
A new report by Bloomberg on Monday revealed that hardware wallet maker, Ledger, is in talks to raise $100 million in a fresh funding round. Recall that the firm raised $380 million in a Series C fundraising round last year.
Should the valuation be successful, the company’s valuation will become higher than its $1.5 billion valuation from June 2021. Worth noting, Ledger is seeking new investor funds despite the current crypto winter.
Ledger and the Market Outlook
Ledger has been in existence in the past bull and bear market. Its success in attracting institutional and high-net-worth investors has made it stand out from the market.
Moreover, the company must have researched and discovered that hardware wallets are one sector of the crypto industry that is immune to crypto winter. Reportedly, there has been a significant decrease in crypto venture capital investments since the start of the crypto winter.
The Ledger website indicates that the company has sold more than 3 million hardware wallets since starting operations in 2014. The company’s 300 employees are available in any of its offices in Paris and other top cities. Ledger’s reason for additional investor funding was to cater to its growing number of customers. Recently, Ledger partnered with the Cardano ecosystem to securely manage 100 Cardano native tokens through the Ledger live app.
Besides selling hardware wallets, Ledger also plans to diversify into other crypto-related services. It seeks to launch services catering to various aspects of the crypto sector. On July 25, 2022, the company launched its NFT (non-fungible token) marketplace.
According to the announcement, Ledger’s NFTs won’t be the only ones it would list on its new platform. The statement also said Ledger is diversifying NFTs due to the lack of creativity and uniqueness in that space. NFT brands and creators can list their works on this marketplace.
On launch day, Ledger listed its Genesis Pass NFT series. The hardware wallet maker sold 10,000 of these NFTs in less than 24 hours of this listing. The genesis pass NFTs topped OpenSea’s trading volume charts for that period.
Side Notes
Despite the crypto market shrinking, countable digital asset startups, such as Magic Eden and Aptos Labs, still earned new funds from venture capital investors due to the high valuations of their firms. Many users may be looking at owning a hardware wallet to store their cryptos following recent events in the crypto space.
Some crypto companies, including exchanges and lenders, have been experiencing liquidity issues that have forced them to pause customer withdrawals.
Crypto exchange, Zipmex, announced that it is having liquidity issues. Also, the crypto lender (Celsius network) and crypto broker, Voyager Digital, have filed for bankruptcy. A usual warning for holders who still keep their cryptos with exchanges is “if it’s not your keys, it is not your coins.”
Rebecca is a Senior Staff Writer at BitcoinWisdom, working hard to bring you the latest breaking news in the cryptocurrency market. In the words of Elon Musk “Buy stock in several companies that make products & services that *you* believe in. Only sell if you think their products & services are trending worse. Don’t panic when the market does. This will serve you well in the long-term.”
