Blockchain start-up Chia stakes $500 valuation, hints at IPO

San-Francisco-based blockchain start-up Chia Network has doubled its valuation to almost $500 million after securing funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Richmond Global Ventures. 

The funding round helped raise $61 million for the start-up founded by Bram Cohen, reported Bloomberg.

The round also witnessed participation from Breyer Capital, Slow Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Collab+Currency, True Ventures, Cygni Capital, and DHVC. 

President and COO, Chia, Gene Hoffman termed this funding “rocket fuel” for hiring and accelerating the company’s ambition to become a trading and payment system used by governments, banks, and other institutions stated the report.

Hoffman hinted at the possibility of going public “relatively quickly”. He believes that it will “allow customers to use the currency to hedge public market volatility, which is different from other coins.”

Chia was invented by Bram Cohen, who also invented the BitTorrent peer-to-peer filesharing system. It is a decentralized storage network that uses hard drives as computing power unlike the energy-intensive proof-of-work mechanism employed by bitcoin.

Last week after Elon Musk’s tweet questioning bitcoin’s energy consumption, the focus has been drawn to greener alternative cryptocurrencies. Hoffman said that Chia was eco-friendly as its operations were less energy-intensive than traditional mining.

Bloomberg quoted Richmond Global Ventures managing partner David Frazee who is joining Chia’s board and personally invested in the company since 2018. He called the Chia coin auditable, secure, and regulatorily compliant, making it user-friendly for monetary authorities and multinationals.

Picture Credits : Make Use Of