Zerohash Eyes $1.5 Billion Valuation After Exiting Mastercard Deal

Blockchain infrastructure firm Zerohash is in discussions to raise $250 million, CoinDesk reported Monday (Jan. 26).

The new funding would value the company at $1.5 billion, the report said, citing an unnamed source.

It was reported Tuesday (Jan. 20) that Zerohash withdrew from acquisition talks with Mastercard, although the larger company is still weighing an investment in Zerohash, and talks are still ongoing. The acquisition talks collapsed when Zerohash decided it wanted to remain independent.

A separate report said the deal would have valued Zerohash at between $1.5 billion and $2 billion.

In November, Zerohash received permission to offer regulated cryptocurrency-asset and stablecoin infrastructure services across the European Economic Area. This allows the company to provide customers with B2B2C embedded crypto and stablecoin services.

When Zerohash raised $104 million in a Series D funding round in September, the company said it is seeing increased demand for enterprise-grade crypto infrastructure, as more financial institutions embrace tokenized assets, stablecoins and on-chain settlement.

Stakeholders in the digital asset ecosystem have gone from “arguing that the old financial system should be replaced” to “trying, more pragmatically, to plug into the machinery that already exists,” PYMNTS reported Friday (Jan. 23).

The most obvious signs of the sector’s maturation came from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, where tokenization was seen as a cost-reduction tool, not a moonshot.

Beyond Davos, last week’s headlines “underscored the ongoing shift in opinion and execution from whether blockchain works, to where it can work without breaking the institutional scaffolding that keeps markets stable,” the report said.

In Washington, D.C., crypto legislation stalled, not due to existential fear but by “legislative triage,” according to the report. In the FinTech marketplace and corporate boardrooms, chief financial officers are being asked to weigh tokenized assets with the same analytical approach they would give any new market structure.

“Crypto, in short, may be entering an unglamorous but potentially decisive phase of mainstream integration,” the report said.

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