CoinDesk
The privacy-centric bitcoin wallet Wasabi, launched by zkSNACKs Ltd. in 2018, just raised its first equity investment from Cypherpunk Holdings, a publicly-traded Canadian firm.
Cypherpunk Holdings CEO Dominic Frisby said the firm invested $337,500 in exchange for a 4.5 percent stake, valuing the wallet startup at $7.5 million.
“It’s extraordinary for a tech company, this early in its evolution, to have the revenues that Wasabi already has,” Frisby said. “It’s one of the only forms of a crypto wallet that have a revenue model.”
Although the zkSNACKs team didn’t respond to requests for comment, co-founder Adam Fiscor previously told CoinDesk the company’s mixer transaction fees earned 14 bitcoin in July 2019 alone (roughly $112,000 by current prices). It appears Wasabi Wallet processed at least 5,373 mixed CoinJoins in July, August and early September. If that trend continued for 12 months, it would put revenues at over $1 million.
This newest addition rounds out Cypherpunk’s holdings, which include roughly 2,000 monero and 180 bitcoin, Frisby said, in addition to equity in the rival privacy project Samourai Wallet (valued at $6.6 million, based on Cypherpunk’s $100,000 investment for 1.5 percent equity) and the blockchain startup Chia, founded by cypherpunk legend Bram Cohen.
“Both wallets, and privacy-enabling services, have very impressive network effects in that the more participants there are, the more private each participant is,” Cypherpunk’s CIO Moe Adham said. “Wasabi is well-positioned to capture much of that market … not only for personal use but also for enterprises.”
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