Chinese cryptocurrency wallet imToken raises $30M Series B led by Qiming and says it has 12M users with over $50B in crypto assets
Context & Ripple Effects
imToken's path to this round runs through its $10M Series A from IDG Capital in 2018, when it already claimed to be the world's largest Ethereum wallet. Three years later, the company says that base has grown to 12M users holding over $50B in crypto assets — a scale that made it fundable again even as Chinese-origin crypto firms operate in ambiguous regulatory territory.
The round also fits a longer arc of domestic capital backing China-linked blockchain startups, following earlier moves like the $1B fund Huobi and Tianya set up in 2018 for blockchain-related investments.
First-order effects
- Qiming takes the lead position on imToken's Series B, putting an established China-focused investor behind a wallet that now touches $50B in user assets — a bet on custody-adjacent infrastructure rather than trading.
- With new capital, imToken can push beyond its Ethereum-wallet origins into serving the broader asset base those 12M users already hold through it.
Second-order effects
- Exchanges like Huobi face a rival at the top of the funnel: wallets sit upstream of trading, and a well-funded imToken can bundle asset services where Huobi currently captures transaction revenue.
- Domestic investors reading Qiming's lead have a template for backing Chinese-founded crypto companies without direct exposure to exchange operations, echoing the earlier Huobi–Tianya fund strategy.
Third-order effects
- If wallet-scale custody keeps concentrating — imToken alone claiming tens of billions in assets — regulators' attention shifts from exchanges to the wallet layer itself, where millions of users' holdings concentrate in a handful of codebases.
- The pattern points toward crypto infrastructure splitting into two camps in Asia: exchange-controlled ecosystems and independent wallets scaling into quasi-financial institutions, each pulling users toward its own stack.
The trend: Crypto wallets are graduating from single-chain utilities to institutionally funded financial infrastructure, with their held-asset scale becoming both the draw for investors and the eventual target for regulators.