Visa Participates In $40mln. Crypto Venture Funding Round

Visa, the global payment giant, has made its second investment in a crypto related startup firm Anchorage. The credit card provider headed a $40 million financing round of the institutional level crypto custody service.

The startup firm raised $17 million in the first funding round, spear headed by Andreessen Horowitz.

In the latest funding round, the amount contributed by Visa and the estimated worth of Anchorage were not revealed. Notably, Visa and Anchorage were part of the Facebook’s stablecoin Libra project, right from the beginning. The endeavor was formally announced on June 18.

The latest financing round is the second disclosed investment of Visa in a blockchain related firm. The previous funding round took place in 2015 when Visa invested in a blockchain startup named Chain, along with Citi and Nasdaq.

The funding round raised $30 million for Chain, which was bought by Lightyear, a Stellar focused firm, in late 2018.

The fund raised in the recent round will be utilized in Anchorage’s objective to offer an acceptable substitute to cold storage-based custody solutions for institutions to guarantee the safety of customers’ holdings. Alternatively, the firm employs a mechanism of several authorizations and human validations, in addition to biometric based software to offer a safe crypto storage facility.

In the final week of May, Anchorage unveiled an insurance coverage facility, as against an overwhelming number of custodians using a combination of cold and hot storage.

While disclosing that they obtained a crime insurance policy, which covers both hot and cold storage of cryptos under a single policy, the company asserted that all cryptocurrency related insurance policies are not the same.

In mid-June, Visa unveiled “Visa B2B Connect,” a cross-border payment mechanism, which is based on certain characteristics of blockchain technology.