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The sudden collapses of FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, and other large crypto firms in 2022 have prompted skeptics to declare the death of crypto. However, amid the rubble, other blockchain companies are quietly expanding.
These include Elementus, a blockchain analytics firm founded in 2018, which announced on Monday that it has raised $10 million in a new funding round led by ParaFi Capital. The new round values the company at $160 million—up from its last valuation of $52 million—with Moonshots Capital, Spitfire Ventures, and Colaco Investment Group among the other investors.
“Blockchain technology is at something of an inflection point right now with all the turmoil that happened last year,” Max Galka, CEO of Elementus, told Fortune. “We really want to be one of the companies to help define the next iteration of blockchain, up the level of sophistication, and make it accessible for a wider and wider group.”
The growth of Elementus reflects a broader interest among investors in companies working deep in the trenches of blockchain, as opposed to eye-grabbing projects like new cryptocurrency exchanges. “We believe there are significant value-creation opportunities at the data and infrastructure layer of blockchain,” Ryan Navi, principal at ParaFi Capital, said in a press release announcing Elementus’s new injection of capital.
Elementus, which doubled its staff from 12 to 24 in 2022, says its prior clients include consulting giant Deloitte and the Department of Defense. Recently, the analytics firm has started working for the legal entities that represent unsecured creditors in the bankruptcies of Celsius, a crypto lender that owes its customers more than $4.7 billion, and BlockFi, another crypto lender that crumbled quickly after FTX’s collapse.
Galka, the CEO of Elementus who was once a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, was careful about not divulging too much about his company’s work for the unsecured creditors. However, he did say Elementus is doing forensic investigations, mapping the flow of the bankrupt firms’ funds as well as where the firms’ crypto assets currently reside.
In December 2022, Elementus charged more than $400,000 in fees and reimbursements for its analytics services in the Celsius bankruptcy, according to recent court documents.
“These are very important cases that we’re working on, and we take this very seriously,” Galka told Fortune. However, he emphasized that parsing through the transactions of high-profile, bankrupt companies isn’t the core of Elementus’s business. “We’re a software company and that’s really the core of our focus,” he said, “even if in the short term, these other deals are occupying an outsized portion of our collective headspace.”
Other blockchain analytics and infrastructure firms to receive funding of late include Sovereign Labs, which is working on a developer interface service and which announced a seed round last Monday from Haun Ventures. Blockstream and QuickNode also announced recent cash influxes.
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