Paris-based cryptocurrency broker SheeldMarket has raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Atomico. As a EU-registered broker, the company wants to help institutional investors buy and sell crypto assets in a regulated way.
Most cryptocurrency products designed for institutional investors focus on American or Asian investors. SheeldMarket thinks it can convince institutional investors in Europe by complying with local regulation and offering a product that works better for European investors.
In addition to Atomico, Semantic also participated in today’s funding round. Several angel investors also participated, such as Pascal Gauthier (CEO of Ledger) and Alexis Bonillo (co-founder of Zenly).
If you want to start investing in cryptocurrencies as an institutional investor, you have to deal with several products and services, such as exchanges, custodians and over-the-counter providers. Customers using SheeldMarket can get started more easily.
When you start working with SheeldMarket, you can deposit your funds directly with SheeldMarket. After that, the startup lets you process market orders through multiple crypto exchanges and over-the-counter platforms. SheeldMarket automatically routes your order to the platform that offers the best exchange rate and/or enough liquidity. The average order size on the platform is $150,000.
“We appreciate SheeldMarket’s advanced platform because it allows us to execute very large trades across multiple global crypto exchanges, in a regulated way, using advanced algorithms. This has been a gamechanger for us when it comes to saving time, manpower and trading costs compared to trying to execute the same volume of trades manually,” Wave Financial’s Benjamin Tsai said in a statement.
In addition to improving its current product offering, SheeldMarket also wants to integrate with decentralized finance protocols (DeFi). This way, it could open up high-yield opportunities to financial investors.
And this is key to understanding the potential of these prime brokers. Institutional investors aren’t just looking for ways to expose part of their portfolio to crypto price changes. DeFi opens up a ton of possibilities with new, sophisticated financial products. And institutional investors always like to be able to access more markets and more products.
Image Credits: SheeldMarket