Institutional roundup: Wormhole raises $225 million, Babylon $18 million

The cryptocurrency industry is attracting an increasing number of institutional players. This is reflected in both new investments in infrastructure and the growing attention companies are giving to Bitcoin as an asset class. The most important events of the past weeks are in ForkLog’s review.

Wormhole raises $225 million at a $2.5 billion valuation

Cross-chain protocol Wormhole closed a $225 million funding round, at which the startup was valued at $2.5 billion.

Among the lead investors: Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Jump Trading, ParaFi, Dialectic, Borderless Capital and Arrington Capital.

The Wormhole Foundation also announced the official launch of Wormhole Labs — an independent technology company specialising in building products and tools and reference implementations focused on cross-chain activity.

The Wormhole protocol was launched in 2021, and since then the network processes over 2 million cross-chain transactions daily, worth roughly $35 billion.

Babylon Bitcoin-staking protocol raises $18 million

The Babylon project, focused on using Bitcoin for staking, raised $18 million in a Series A financing round led by Polychain Capital and Hack VC.

Among other investors: Framework Ventures, Polygon Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, OKX Ventures and Symbolic Capital.

Co-founder David Ce noted that the round “stock warrants plus tokens” began in late July and only recently concluded. In March the project attracted $8 million in seed funding.

Babylon opens the possibility for users to stake BTC in systems using the Proof-of-Stake mechanism and earn income from it. The protocol is also intended to enhance the security of other blockchains.

According to Ce, the project is already in talks with representatives from Cosmos Hub and Polygon.

The protocol launch is expected “roughly with the next Bitcoin halving.”

The raised funds will be used to expand the development team and grow the ecosystem.

DeFi platform Coinchange raises $10 million

The decentralized finance platform Coinchange closed a $10 million Series B financing round.

Participants included G1.VC, Spirit Blockchain, Good News Ventures, K2.CA, Atoia Ventures and Mintfox.

The proceeds will be used to expand the range of services, improve products and attract new clients.

Shadow crypto-data platform raises $9 million

The crypto-data platform Shadow raised $9 million in a seed round led by Paradigm to reduce Ethereum development costs.

Among other investors: Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap and Flashbots.

The company’s first product enables anyone to augment any contract to obtain precise and relevant data. To reflect the state of public blockchains in real time, the platform uses so-called “shadow forks” and a private execution environment.