Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Castle Island Ventures is a blockchain venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage “permission-less blockchain ecosystem.” The venture capital firm was founded in 2018 and has a portfolio consisting of positions within a handful of blockchain companies: Flipside Crypto, Zenledger, Casa, Coin Metrics, and Dust Identity. It is not immediately clear how much Castle Island Ventures holds in assets under management.
Castle Island Ventures recently led the $1.9 million seed funding round for Coin Metrics, Inc., a cryptocurrency market and network data provider. Other key investment firms that participated in the seed round include: Fidelity Investments, Highland Capital Partners, and Dragonfly Capital. Coin Metrics was founded in 2018 by Nic Carter and Aleksei Nokhrin.
Coin Metrics, Inc. Press Release:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 27, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Coin Metrics Inc, a leading provider of cryptoasset market and network data, has closed a $1.9 million seed round of venture funding. Castle Island Ventures led the financing round, with participation from Fidelity Investments, Highland Capital Partners and Dragonfly Capital.
Coin Metrics delivers transparent and actionable data to various industry stakeholders including financial enterprises, funds, media and research outlets, and data/application providers. Coin Metrics’ data empowers its clients and the public to better understand, value, use, and engage with blockchain based assets.
“All of our investors are bought into the idea that the next phase of cryptoasset
“Our approach to aggregating cryptoasset market data will use the guiding principles from the IOSCO Benchmark for Financial Benchmarks. We intend to bridge the wild west crypto market data world by translating fair value measurements, similar to FASB 157, meant to provide a credible confidence level assessment of fair value pricing for any particular market,” Rice added.
“I am thrilled to be handing off executive leadership of Coin Metrics to Tim Rice and the team we have assembled,” Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures said. “I truly believe cryptoasset data is the richest economic dataset on the planet today, which is why myself and Aleksei started the project two years ago. I am very excited to demonstrate the strength of our analysis to our early clients and to continue to build a public resource that the world can enjoy.”
Alex Pack of Dragonfly Capital added: “Our firm works with some of the largest funds, exchanges, and traders in the cryptoasset class and we’ve seen first-hand how the lack of trustworthy data holds back the industry. We’re excited to back Coin Metrics in bringing a new level of maturity and professionalism to the crypto markets.”
Coin Metrics was created in 2017 by Nic Carter and Aleksei Nokhrin as an open source blockchain network data and analytics project. It has become a major industry resource for understanding network data – all the operational and economic activity occurring on a public blockchain that can be observed by running a full node. Coin Metrics Inc was incorporated in August 2018.
In November 2018, Tim Rice joined as co-founding CEO, bringing over 30 years of experience in traditional capital markets data. He has held executive positions at Tradeweb, Moneyline Telerate, Thomson Reuters and Markit (now Markit IHS) where he built out large scale institutional-grade pricing and reference data business. He spent the past two years at ConsenSys where he gained invaluable insights into bridging the gap between crypto and traditional capital markets.
About Coin Metrics:
Coin Metrics (www.coinmetrics.io) is a leading venture-backed provider of transparent and actionable cryptoasset market and network data. Coin Metrics delivers mature data across multiple formats to various industry stakeholders including financial enterprises, funds, media and research outlets, and data/application providers. Coin Metrics’ data empowers its clients and the public to better understand, value, use, and ultimately steward public crypto networks.
About Castle Island Ventures
Founded in 2018, Castle Island Ventures is a Cambridge, MA based venture capital firm that is focused on early stage companies in the permissionless blockchain ecosystem. Castle Island Ventures invests in infrastructure and application companies that will enable these transformative protocols to power services for the next billion users. The firm was founded by Matt Walsh and Nic Carter, who previous to Castle Island Ventures led a number of early stage blockchain efforts at Fidelity Investments. To learn more about Castle Island Ventures visit www.castleisland.vc.
