Bitcoin has taken a major hit in the past year, now trading at just over $200 from a peak of roughly $1,200 at the end of 2013. But VCs are undeterred.
In the past two weeks, venture investors have already inked three deals for Bitcoin startups — one of which, a $75M Series C for Coinbase, is the largest investment in the space to date.
This is a trend we’ve picked up on before. Last year, a sharp drop in bitcoin prices over a weekend in October was followed by so much VC activity that the subsequent week’s total accounted for 15% of the $360 million raised by bitcoin startups in previous two year span.
Coinbase’s latest tranche of funding came from some of Bitcoin’s most bullish backers — Crypto Currency Partners, Ribbit Capital, and a16z among them. With $105 million in total capital committed, Coinbase is the highest-funded bitcoin startup yet.
It’s shaping up to be a busy month for Crypto Currency, who put another chunk of cash into cloud-optimized block chain platform BlockCypher‘s seed round last week.
We’ve yet to see a billion dollar bitcoin unicorn, but given the current pace it looks like that might be happening sooner than expected.
Image via Flickr user BTC Keychain.
