Received US$200 million in financing led by Temasek, Amber Group's one-year asset management scale increased by 10 times

Author | Qin Xiaofeng

Editor | Hao Fangzhou

Produced | Odaily

according toBloombergAuthor | Qin Xiaofeng

Editor | Hao FangzhouAmber GroupProduced | Odaily

according to

Bloomberg

According to news, Amber Group, the world's leading encrypted financial service provider, completed a financing of US$200 million at a valuation of US$3 billion, led by Temasek, with participation from Sequoia China, Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Tiger Global Management . This round of financing will be used to recruit in Europe and the Americas, and to further expand the user coverage of its app launched globally last year.

Last June,

It has also completed a $100 million Series B financing with a valuation of over $1 billion. Investors include Tiger Brokers, Tiger Global Management, Arena Holdings, Tru Arrow Partners, A&T Capital, Sky9 Capital, DCM Ventures, Gobi Partners, Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Blockchain.com.

In just half a year, the valuation of Amber Group has tripled, and it has won the favor of many top capitals in the world. Who is Amber Group? How is the business layout? This article will analyze them one by one.

(1) Aim at retail and institutional markets

Amber Group is a global encryption trading and asset management service platform headquartered in Singapore.

In 2015, Amber was established. The founding team is mainly from Wall Street investment banks such as Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bloomberg. It has successively obtained MSB licenses in the United States, Canada and other countries; Amber AI, which was originally established, mainly trades securities by using artificial intelligence algorithms. In the summer of 2017, the team shifted its focus from traditional finance to encrypted finance and established the Amber Group. Michael Wu, co-founder and CEO of Amber Group, believes that in the long run, the encrypted financial ecology will eventually be far ahead of the traditional financial ecology because it is more innovative.

Due to the accumulation of certain resources in the traditional financial market earlier, in the first few years, Amber Group’s positioning was aimed at the institutional market, mainly for traditional institutions, high-net-worth individuals, family funds, etc. to allocate encrypted assets and provide related encrypted services.

Although the brand recognition of Amber Group is not high for encrypted C-end users, their strategy has allowed Amber to survive and develop rapidly in the bear market in 2018. Data shows that as of October 2020, Amber Group has served more than 200 institutions and high-net-worth clients around the world, with a cumulative transaction volume exceeding US$220 billion, an average monthly transaction volume of US$1 billion, and an asset size of approximately US$150 million.

WhaleFin is a one-stop digital asset trading platform, which started operation at the beginning of the third quarter of 2020. It mainly provides legal currency deposits, currency transactions, derivatives transactions, (regular, current) financial management, pledge lending and other services. It is benchmarked against Binance or top CEX. More importantly, WhaleFin can provide customized financial products according to user needs.

Facts have proved that such a transformation has also promoted the rapid development of Amber Group's business volume. According to official website data, Amber Group’s asset management scale currently exceeds US$5 billion, an increase of nearly 10 times compared to US$530 million a year ago; in addition, it has doubled compared to a year ago; the number of institutional users has also increased from last year’s 500 grew to over 1,000 today.

After 5 years of development, the Amber Group team has grown to 750 people, mainly composed of technicians, traders and engineers, operating around the clock around the world, covering 150 countries around the world; headquartered in Singapore, and in Athens, Chicago, Geneva , Dubai, Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, Mexico City, New Jersey, Salt Lake City, Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo, Vancouver and Zurich.

In addition, the institutional services provided by Amber Group have also developed from simple encrypted asset allocation to diversified services, including electronic market making, over-the-counter transactions, execution services, loans and time deposits, derivatives and structured products, mortgage loans , mining and pledge, investment and DeFi, etc.

"We are market-centric and play the role of liquidity provider, miner and validator in more than 70 exchanges, applications and networks. We provide digital asset trading, investment, infrastructure and financing services for various Wealth can be created by customers of large scale.” Amber Group said on its official website.

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(2) Diversified operation: investment, research and development

In addition to providing encrypted trading services for institutions and retail investors, Amber Group is also continuously expanding its business direction and diversifying its operations. The two most important carriages are investment and research and development.

In terms of investment, Amber Group is in line with "smart money". The leading investment institutions of its participating projects are basically leading capitals such as Alameda Research, Three Arrows Capital, a16z, and Binance Labs.

In addition, Amber Group is also committed to the research of the underlying infrastructure of the blockchain to enable encryption application scenarios.

For example, Amber Group has established a cooperation with Risks-X, a risk analysis, forecasting and management institute, focusing on solving a series of problems of blockchain network delay and fragmented liquidity. Amber Group partnered with Talo to develop KeeperDAO, an economic redistribution protocol and virtual memory pool that can reduce Ethereum network congestion, lower gas prices, and reduce front-running transactions. Amber Group also launched the tool Loot Swag for the Loot ecology, which can visualize the equipment in Loot and generate a character avatar...

“Through our open APIs, we enable companies to leverage digital finance, Web3 and hosting infrastructure. We work with partners ranging from e-wallets, payment providers and exchanges, to sports teams, brands and gaming platforms, to provide Fully integrated solutions and products driven by blockchain tools and technology. Our modular technology stack brings together everything you need to enable digitization, tokenization, custody, exchange, settlement, payments and wallet management to match the right fit for your business products and solutions.” The official website introduces the business of Amber Group To B.

Last year, Amber Group also cooperated with TR Lab to launch a new NFT creator studio called CreatorFi. Amber Group is responsible for providing technical support for the platform, including casting, hosting and platform penetration testing.

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(3) Committed to listing in compliance with regulations and recruiting talents