Today New York-based Paxos announced it raised $300 million in a Series D round valuing it at $2.4 billion. It raised $142 million for its Series C a little over four months ago. Oak led the latest round with participation from PayPal Ventures and several others.
While Paxos is best known in the cryptocurrency world, it has big ambitions in payments and post-trade settlement. It provides crypto brokerage for the PayPal and Venmo cryptocurrency offerings and has a stablecoin-as-a service offering. Apart from its own stablecoin PAX standard, it provides the infrastructure for the BINANCE USD stablecoin and Huobi USD stablecoins to the tune of almost $10 billion.
But it also has a permissioned blockchain post-trade solution to settle U.S. stock trades. Nomura’s Instinet and Credit Suisse recently disclosed using the solution for T+0 settlement. It has applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a Clearing Agency registration and is currently operating under a no-action relief letter. Plus Paxos runs a commodities post-trade service for precious metals and claims to have processed more than $3.5 trillion in transactions.
“Demand for our enterprise solutions has accelerated much faster than we could have anticipated,” said Charles Cascarilla, CEO and Co-Founder of Paxos. “It validates our approach to providing the most innovative and regulated enterprise solutions to replatform the financial system and create the digital economy of the future.”
Paxos aims to become a major financial market infrastructure. To that end, it recently received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a Trust Bank charter for digital assets. And it has applied for a Major Payment Institution license in Singapore.
The latest funding brings the total raised to more than $540 million. Other investors in this round included Declaration Partners, Mithril Capital, Senator Investment Group, Liberty City Ventures, and WestCap amongst others.
