A digital asset venture fund has made its first investment, into Singapore's Coinhako.
The Sygnum-SBI-Azimut Digital Asset Opportunity (DAO) fund has invested in Coinhako to enable the crypto bourse to expand geographically into Southeast Asia, as well as into institutional and high-net-worth customer segments.
The strategic fundraising round was three times oversubscribed and attracted other prominent institutional investors including SBI Group, Japan's largest fintech conglomerate, according to an announcement on Tuesday.
The DAO fund brings together the collective digital asset experience and networks of SBI, Sygnum and Azimut, and aims to accelerate the growth of promising companies in this sector, while providing qualifying investors with access to the digital asset economy. There are currently several potential investment targets in the pipeline, the announcement said.
Expansion Opportunity
The new funds raised will now enable Coinhako to grow its team as it expands across Southeast Asia to serve the region's rapidly growing cryptocurrency user base, and accelerate its acquisition of a deeper and wider customer base in Singapore with Coinhako Privé, its recently launched institutional and high-net-worth offering.
Earlier this month, Coinhako became the first local non-bank crypto exchange to receive in-principal approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore to operate as a provider for Digital Payment Token (DPT) services in Singapore.
Launched in 2014, Coinhako offers both fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-crypto trading services with a digital wallet for retail traders. In the first eight months of 2021, Coinhako saw a 1,000 percent increase in trading volume, compared to the whole of 2020. Currently, it has over 300,000 registered users in Singapore and an average of 150,000 monthly active users.
