Coinbase is now valued at $8B after closing new $300M round

Even in a bear market, investors see money in crypto. Crypto exchange Coinbase says it is now valued at over $8 billion after it closed a new $300 million round of funding to “accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies and digital assets.”

The U.S. company said this Series E investment was led by Tiger Global with participation from Y Combinator’s Continuity fund and Wellington Management — a $1 trillion fund that recently got into crypto — alongside Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain among others.

The deal takes Coinbase to $525 million from investors to date, while the valuation represents a huge jump on the $1.6 billion it was deemed to be worth when it previously raised — that was $100 million back in August 2017.

The company has made a big push in the past year to broaden its services from consumers to catering to institutional investors, and it said that it plans to use this new capital to continue that strategy.

In addition, the firm plans to broaden its focus outside of the U.S. to offer fiat-to-crypto exchanges services in other parts of the world. That’s in line with other exchanges, including Binance. Initially famous for crypto-to-crypto trading, Binance, the world’s largest exchange based on trading, has plans to open at least 10 fiat-to-crypto exchanges worldwide by the end of next year.

The capital will also go towards “the groundwork to support thousands” more tokens in the future. Coinbase currently allows trading to just a handful of cryptocurrencies, but it has long harbored ambitions to expand beyond that. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September, CEO Brian Armstrong revealed that he sees a future in which every cap table will have its own token. Based on that, he said he believes that Coinbase could host hundreds of tokens within “years” and even potentially “millions” in the future.

Coinbase recently introduced a USDC stablecoin earlier this month and it plans to offer further ‘utility applications’ this like this in future, Asiff Hirji — Coinbase present and COO — said in the blog post announcing the new funding.

At Disrupt, Armstrong also said he would love to one day run a public company. It remains to be seen what the company’s long-term plan for an IPO is.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.