NEAR-based wallet Sender raises $4.5 million in private round

NEAR Protocol (NEAR/USD) ecosystem wallet Sender has successfully raised $4.5 million in a private round that attracted several leading crypto-focused venture firms.

An announcement the NEAR-based eco-wallet team published on Monday states that the investment firm Pantera Capital led the funding round. Participation included Crypto.com Capital, Jump Capital, WOO Network, SevenX Ventures, Amber Group, Smrti Labs, D1 Ventures, Puzzle Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Shima Capital, and GFS Ventures.

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The financing round also attracted leading projects from within the NEAR ecosystem, including Octopus Network, Ref Finance, and Paras.

The private round was organised as a token sale and came a few months after Binance Labs and Metaweb Ventures led the Sender team’s seed round in April this year.

Sender eyes growth in the NEAR ecosystem

Per the platform, the infusion of fresh funds will help it expand the R&D team as well as raise the wallet’s security threshold.

Sender also plans to use the additional financial muscle to further adoption across the NEAR ecosystem. Part of this goal will be to add to the already more than 30 projects integrated with the wallet in the NEAR Protocol, a milestone that has seen over 500,000 cumulative downloads of Sender’s plug-in and mobile versions.

The NEAR token is up nearly 5% in the past 24 hours as the protocol continues to see some bullish bounce. In fact, the coin popped 35% on 8 August amid buy pressure as the broader crypto and stocks market saw some relief rally.

Commenting on the round and Sender Wallet’s growth, Pantera Capital general partner Paul Veradittakit said:

“As the leading crypto wallet in the NEAR ecosystem with a complete suite of browser plugins and iOS and Android apps, Sender is seeing tremendous user growth and we are excited to help them reach the next level.” 

The attraction is enhanced by the wallet’s ease of use around built-in support for staking, token swap, and non-fungible token (NFT) showcase among other functionality.

Sender’s growing stature among crypto users is also down to its support for multi-hardware wallets connection, in this case to Ledger and Keystone.

Other than that, users can buy cryptocurrency right from the wallet in more than 140 countries thanks to the wallet’s fiat-to-crypto support. This it offers via integration with payment providers Moonpay, Banxa, and Transak.

Future plans for growth include offering a liquidity aggregation via Sender Swap; Sender Pool (node staking); Sender Market – a one-stop on-chain aggregation of NFTs, and a multi-signature hosted wallet, Sender Pro.