Blockdaemon, which offers blockchain staking infrastructure, raises $155M Series B led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a $1.26B valuation
Blockdaemon has raised $155 million in a Series B capital round at a valuation of $1.3 billion, the provider of blockchain staking infrastructure said Tuesday.
Context & Ripple Effects
Blockdaemon is on a fast fundraising cadence: the $28M Series A in June 2021 brought in Goldman Sachs and BlockFi Lending as backers of its enterprise node and staking infrastructure, and four months later SoftBank Vision Fund 2 leads this $155M round at roughly a $1.3B valuation. The round lands amid a broader wave of capital into blockchain infrastructure — weeks earlier, Blockstream raised $210M at a $3.2B valuation for Bitcoin-side infrastructure.
For SoftBank, the deal is one more data point in Vision Fund 2's aggressive deployment pace: the fund was writing checks at roughly twice the rate of its predecessor, including $22.8B across 65 deals in Q3 2021 alone.
First-order effects
- Blockdaemon gains the balance sheet to scale node management and staking operations for enterprise customers, converting the June Series A's institutional roster into a much larger war chest.
- SoftBank Vision Fund 2 adds staking infrastructure to its portfolio at an early enough stage to own a meaningful position before the category prices up further.
Second-order effects
- Competing infrastructure providers face a newly capitalized rival; Blockstream's $3.2B raise a month prior shows investors are funding both Bitcoin and proof-of-stake sides of the stack, forcing every player to justify platform scope, not just uptime.
- Enterprise-oriented backers like Goldman Sachs signal to financial institutions that staking-as-a-service is investable, pulling traditional capital toward validator economics.
Third-order effects
- If follow-on rounds hold their momentum — Blockdaemon went on to raise a $207M Series C at a $3.25B post-money valuation — staking infrastructure consolidates into a small set of scaled operators, the way custody did for exchanges.
- Later entrants like Babylon, which lets proof-of-stake systems source staking capital from bitcoin via a $70M Paradigm-led round, show the category evolving from operating nodes toward engineering where staking capital itself comes from.
The trend: Blockchain infrastructure is being repriced from developer tooling to venture-scale financial plumbing, with mega-rounds concentrating staking operations among a few heavily capitalized platforms.