Goldman Sachs Led Series B Funding Round of Fnality; Raised Over $90M

Prominent investment banking firm Goldman Sachs reportedly made an investment in blockchain based payment company Fnality International. The investment was provided in the second round of funding for the payment protocol. The round was led by Goldman Sachs along with financial services company BNP Paribas.

Reuters reported that the company announced the completion of receiving 77.7 Million pounds, or $95.09 Million after Tuesday’s funding round. In addition, the other participants in the funding round were Nomura, WisdomTree, and settlement houses DTCC and Euroclear.

Fnality stated that it will allocate the funds for deployment of the first of its kind ‘round-the-clock’ global liquidity management network for its new digital payment models. This model will be workable for both wholesale financial markets as well as tokenized asset markets.

Emergence of blockchain technology supported many revolutionizing ideas and tokenizing of assets is among them. Ethereum blockchain, for instance, has an abundance of them. Fnality is seen as a leading player in the on-chain delivery of cash for wholesale banking through distributed ledgers.

CEO Rhomaios Ram stated that the Series B funding round underscores that the financial space intends to support a “central bank money backed blockchain-based settlement solution. It will reduce the gap of traditional finance and decentralized finance that exists in wholesale markets.

Earlier, Fnality International received 55 Million pounds in funding in the investment rounds led by Banco Santander, BNY Mellon, Commerzbank, Barclays, Lloyds Banking, Nasdaq Ventures among several others. With the recent funding round, the overall investment has crossed 130 Million pounds.

Head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs, Matthew McDermott, said that the application of blockchain technology offered by Fnality is resilient for institutions. The firms can use central bank funds to perform various tasks including cross border and cross-currency transactions, collateral mobility, and security transactions.

Crypto Investment Foray of Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs made investments in other similar crypto projects such as Canton Network. The blockchain project designed to streamline the financial markets with the help of Web3 technology. It relies on software company Digital Asset-created smart-contract language, Daml. The bank also backs crypto custodian firm BitGo.

Overall, the crypto firm investment portfolio of Goldman Sachs includes 11 companies, according to a CNBC report. This includes Coin Metrics. Infrastructure firm Blockdaemon and TRM Labs.

In an interview with CNBC in February this year, digital assets head at the firm McDermott stated that Goldman Sachs focused on blockchain infrastructure prior to making investments in the crypto space. He added that the bank is also looking at “interest opportunities” that seems to be more sensible.