Cryptocurrency lending startup BlockFi raises $18.3M Series A led by Peter Thiel-backed Valar Ventures, as it eyes new products and markets
The Block :
Context & Ripple Effects
BlockFi's Series A lands a year after its $52.5M round led by Mike Novogratz's Galaxy Digital, and marks a handoff of lead-investor duty to Peter Thiel-backed Valar Ventures. The crypto-lending thesis is now being validated twice by the same firm: two years later Valar leads Singapore rival Vauld's $25M Series A, making crypto lending-and-borrowing a deliberate Thiel portfolio theme rather than a one-off bet.
The arc that follows gives this 2019 round its meaning: BlockFi rides the bull market to a $350M Series D at a $3B valuation by March 2021, then by mid-2022 sources report a down round at a $1B valuation — so this modest $18.3M raise is the entry point of a boom-bust cycle in crypto credit.
First-order effects
- BlockFi gets $18.3M and a Thiel-affiliated lead to fund the new products and new markets it says it is eyeing, extending the runway opened by Galaxy Digital's 2018 round.
- Valar Ventures takes a lead position in crypto lending for the first time in this corpus, putting Peter Thiel's firm directly into the yield-on-crypto business.
Second-order effects
- Valar's conviction compounds across the category: within two years it leads Vauld's $25M Series A, forcing BlockFi to compete against a portfolio sibling backed by the same investor.
- Galaxy Digital's early bet gets marked up as later rounds pile on — the merchant bank's 2018 lead becomes the template other financiers price off as valuations climb toward $3B.
Third-order effects
- The pattern the corpus traces — $18.3M in 2019, $3B valuation in 2021, reported down round at $1B in 2022 — suggests crypto lending was structurally a leveraged bet on crypto prices rather than a durable standalone credit business.
- If the cycle repeats, specialist lenders like BlockFi and Vauld face consolidation or distress while their backers' diversification across multiple lending startups functions as a hedge on the category itself.
The trend: Venture firms are building repeatable positions in crypto lending — Valar backs BlockFi and later Vauld — but the sector's funding arc from seed to $3B to a reported down round shows how tightly crypto credit tracks the underlying asset cycle.