Goldman Sachs and Barclays Backed Elwood to Raise $70 Million in the Collapse of Crypto

Matthew McDermott, head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs, pointed out that the company is expanding its business to meet the rising demand for cryptocurrencies.

Investment banking firm Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and UK multinational general bank Barclays (NYSE: BCS) recently supported a round of US $70 million financing of cryptocurrency trading platform Elwood technologies. The two top Wall Street players invested in the cryptocurrency company in the collapse of the whole major cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency market was in chaos, and investors lost a huge part of their funds. Despite the volatility, Goldman Sachs and Barclays are still confident in the future of digital assets.

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Goldman Sachs and Barclays Invest in Elwood

In addition to Goldman Sachs and Barclays, other supporters of Elwood’s round of financing include dawn capital and the venture capital departments of German commercial bank and Galaxy digital. With new capital, Elwood technologies is now valued at more than $500 million. This financing is also Elwood’s first external financing since its establishment in 2020.

When hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard founded the cryptocurrency company, the plan was to manage his personal digital assets. However, the company has developed to provide various services, including asset management software. Elwood’s clients include banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, fintech and hedge funds.

According to James Strickland, Elwood’s chief executive, funds from Goldman Sachs and Barclays are “another verification of the life of cryptocurrencies.” “We are getting investments from financial institutions that don’t expect a lot of returns in 15 minutes. I think this is a reassuring message,” he said.

At the same time, Matthews, the head of Goldman Sachs, pointed out that the demand for cryptocurrency was increasing. McDermott said Goldman is also broadening its capabilities to meet the needs of its customers. According to him, investing in Elwood shows the bank’s “continued investment” in cryptocurrencies.

Generally speaking, cryptocurrency is considered to be risk sensitive and speculative, and the market has fluctuated greatly in the past few weeks. Since April, the total market valuation of cryptocurrency has decreased by about 40%. Capitalization has been reduced from more than $1 trillion to about $1.3 billion. Inflationary pressures and interest rate hikes are killing the stock market and affecting consumers.

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Elwood Integrated Bloomberg

Elwood and Bloomberg announced their integration in February to serve their customers. This cooperation is to enable Elwood’s cryptocurrency trading platform to flow directly into Bloomberg’s order management system.

Elwood also sold $1 billion of blockchain based assets to coinshares in 2021. The deal is a fragment of coinsahres’ agreement to acquire Elwood’s indexation business. “Unless the infrastructure is there and you’re comforted about the quality of the underlying architecture, you’ll never really get the number that matches the opportunity,” Elwood’s CEO added.