Grayscale-parent DCG rockets to $10bn valuation

Digital Currency Group says it is selling shares to SoftBank and Alphabet’s venture capital branch in a deal that values the crypto conglomerate at more than $10 billion.

The American venture capital company announced its secondary round, in which existing investors are selling shares to new backers.

The $700m deal was led by SoftBank and included Ribbit Capital and CapitalG – a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, among others.

DCG is the parent company of some big names in the crypto space. One subsidiary, Grayscale Investments, is the world’s biggest digital asset manager with more than $50bn under management.

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust represents the largest Bitcoin fund in the world. It recently applied to convert into an ETF.

Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of DCG, said the company was “the best proxy for investing in this industry”.

“We were looking for the type of backers that could be, and hopefully will be with, with us on this journey for the next couple of decades,” he said.

‘DCG has the power to evolve’

CapitalG founder and general partner David Lawee added that he saw this as a way to back a potential winner in crypto-financial services.

“When I think back to the nineties, very few companies I met still exist – it’s very hard to evolve as quickly as technology evolves – you need to be a pretty nimble company to take advantage of it,” Lawee said.

DCG also holds various digital assets, including Bitcoin. The world’s largest cryptocurrency hit an all-time high of almost $67,000 in October and ended the month up by more than 40%.

Silbert also suggested that 99% of the digital assets that exist today are overvalued, and most don’t really have a reason to exist.

“But I’m also a believer in creative destruction and that’s okay that they aren’t going to be valuable – what’s going to come out of it is some incredibly valuable, impactful protocols,” he said.