The bear market crisis has not deterred a purely Bitcoin company from raising $60 million.
Unchained, a provider of financial services for Bitcoin (BTC) holders, has announced a $60 million Series B funding round led by Valor Equity Partners. NYDIG, Trammell Venture Partners, Ecliptic Capital and Highland Capital Partners have also participated.
Unchained Capital offers a more secure way of escrowing fees than storing cryptocurrency on centralized exchanges or a single key solution. The custody model takes advantage of the native multi-signature capabilities of the Bitcoin network in that customers share control of their Bitcoin between private keys they own and private keys held by Unchained or other financial services companies.
Multi-signature solutions eliminate single points of failure and mitigate counterparty risk by sharing it among multiple parties. In a nutshell, Let’s compare the multi-signature process with a safe deposit box with two keys, one held by the customer and one held by the bank.
Single points of failure were a recurring theme during the 2022 cryptocurrency crashes: From BlockFi to Celsius to Three Arrows Capital, a host of centralized solutions collapsed, taking user funds along with them. The Multisig or multisignature solution radically reduces the risk, since neither party can flee with the funds.
Unchained Capital CEO Joe Kelly explained:
“Multisig is one of the most important technologies in the ecosystem that can be generalized. It helps protect people from loss and theft, two of the biggest problems in the industry.”
Till the date, Unchained secures over $2 billion worth of Bitcoin through thousands of keys around the world. Casa, a competing cryptosecurity firm, recently added Ethereum (ETH) to its product suite.
According to the announcement, the $60 million in funding will be used to further expand the customer base and product offering. Kelly told Cointelegraph:
“Using this new capital investment to expand our reach and suite of services, we hope to enable new Bitcoin entrants to outperform centralized custodians in our more secure collaborative custodian model.”
Ultimately, the group hopes to promote the “not your keys, not your coins” mantra. In light of centralized exchange crashes, more Bitcoin and cryptocurrency enthusiasts are learning to take custody of their assets, and multisig will undoubtedly play a bigger role.
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