Ethereum advocacy firm Etherealize has closed a $40 million funding round to help it pitch the blockchain to Wall Street in a week that’s already seen public firms add over $1.2 billion worth of Ether to their treasuries.
Etherealize said on Wednesday that the crypto-focused venture firms Electric Capital and Paradigm led the round, which it would use to “continue driving institutional adoption of Ethereum.”
The company launched in January with funding from the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to educate institutions on the blockchain and the Ether (ETH) token.
Wall Street has yet to embrace ETH as deeply as it has Bitcoin (BTC) when comparing the trading volumes and inflows to related exchange-traded funds.
Etherealize co-founder Grant Hummer said in January that amid the ETF launches, he noticed institutions lacked education on ETH, which the company wanted to address.
Etherealize to use funds for institutional tools
Etherealize said the $40 million would be put toward developing crypto-based financial tools aimed at institutions.
The firm wants to build infrastructure for privately trading and settling tokenized assets, a settlement platform geared to “institutional tokenization workflows,” and applications aimed at markets for tokenized fixed income products, such as tokenized bonds.
“Over the past decade, Ethereum has gone from an experiment to the world’s most battle-tested, open financial network,” said Etherealize co-founder Danny Ryan, adding the raise would help upgrade “institutional finance to modern, safer, globally accessible rails.”
Public firms add $1.26 billion worth of ETH this week
Etherealize’s raise comes after public firms globally have added $1.2 billion worth of ETH to their holdings so far this week, according to data from the website Strategic ETH Reserve.
The Ether Machine, a so-called crypto treasury company that is planning to go public soon, made the week’s largest addition with a 150,000 ETH raise on Tuesday, valued at $654 million.
The same day, the largest ETH holding firm, BitMine Immersion Technologies, said it scooped up over 150,000 ETH over the previous week, with data from Arkham showing it bought an additional $65 million worth on Wednesday.
Related: Ether exchange reserves fall to 3-year low as ETFs, corporate treasuries soak up supply
Sharplink Gaming and the Hong Kong-listed Yunfeng Financial announced they bought more ETH on Tuesday, making respective purchases worth $176 million and $44 million.
ETH at nearly 50% odds of $6,000 this year
Nick Forster, the founder of crypto options platform Derive, said in a note on Wednesday that a possible Federal Reserve rate cut this month and the ETH buys by public companies have set it up “for explosive potential heading into Q4.”
He said ETH-buying firms now hold nearly 4% of the token supply, and a rate cut could see such companies “holding 6-10% of ETH’s supply by year-end, positioning them as a major force behind ETH’s price action.”
Forster predicted there was a 44% chance that ETH reaches $6,000 by the end of the year, and gave 30% odds of it hitting that price by the end of October.
Ether is currently trading for just under $4,400, up 1.8% on the day, but it has fallen 11.5% since its peak of around $4,950 on Aug. 24.
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