Ethereum development studio ConsenSys has raised $200 million in its latest financing round. This comes at a time when its flagship product Metamask now counts around 21 million monthly active users (MAUs).
ConsenSys announced the close of the funding round in a press release on Wednesday, November 17. According to the announcement, the last round has brought its valuation to $3.2 billion.
🔈We have two exciting announcements today!
🦊@metamask now has 21M+ monthly active users.
📈We've raised $200M.https://t.co/FLjkfCIJaG
— Consensys (@Consensys) November 17, 2021
The investors include Marshall Wace, Third Point, ParaFi Capital, and Think Investments alongside its new partners that include Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital, Spartan Group, DeFiance Capital, Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, and HSBC. New York City-based international white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP acted as a legal advisor in this transaction.
ConsensSys started its career as an incubator in 2015, the time when the Ethereum blockchain was in the development stage. Since then, it has evolved into an Ethereum giant that is now leading the way to Web 3 by using Ethereum as a foundation layer-2.
As Crypto Economy previously explained, ConsenSys is the most important firm in the Ethereum ecosystem that offers full-stack Ethereum products to help developers build next-generation networks and enable enterprises to launch more powerful financial infrastructure on Ethereum. It acts as a development studio where developers can build powerful Dapps.
The journey to an Ethereum giant is largely supported by its two flagship products: self-custodial wallet MetaMask and development kit Infura. Metamask is a browser extension and a mobile wallet that serves as a gateway for almost all of the apps built on Ethereum.
The latest funding has come at a time when Metamask and Infura are flourishing. According to ConsenSys, Metamask now has a global user base of approximately 21 million monthly active users (MAUs), which is a 38 fold increase from 2020. The wallet currently interacts with a “universe of approximately 3,700 unique Web3 applications.”
Furthermore, Metamask also supports Ethereum-compatible Layer 2 networks such as Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, BSC, Celo, Avalanche, and NEAR/Aurora, which, according to the company, represent “more than 90% of global smart contract network volume.” Metamask Institutional is an institution-compliant version of Metamask that integrates custody and compliance solutions for organizations to access and engage in DeFi.
ConsenSys’s development kit Infura is currently used by 350K developers. Its other products include Truffle, Diligence, Quorum, and CodeFi. ConsenSys is increasingly integrating its other products with Infura to support the entire development lifecycle.
The capital raised will be used for the rapid expansion of its products and new hiring. The announcement reads:
“Funding will support the rapid expansion of MetaMask and Infura’s industry-leading products as well as the addition of 400 new roles across its products and services.”
