I’m thrilled to share that Paxos has closed its Series C investment round and raised $142 million, bringing our total funding to more than $240 million. We are honored to have the support of our lead investor Declaration Partners, as well as new investors Mithril Capital, PayPal Ventures, RIT Capital Partners, Ken Moelis, Alua Capital, Senator Investment Group and more. It is also meaningful to have continued support from past investors like RRE, Liberty City Ventures and others. Their support will help accelerate our growth so we can maintain our leadership position as the provider of blockchain and cryptocurrency infrastructure solutions for the largest enterprises and financial institutions like PayPal, Credit Suisse, Societe Generale and Revolut.

Our mission at Paxos is to enable the movement of any asset, any time, in a trustworthy way. That has never changed since we founded the company, but there are many layers to how we achieve this mission. To get there, we believe that we need to help facilitate movement toward a more open, digital economy. In order for the financial system of the future to be truly open, it should be token-based, versus the current account-based system. And to facilitate the mainstream transition to this system, Paxos is building the most effective, high-volume infrastructure. This allows institutions with trillions of dollars worth of assets and billions of customers to become part of the ecosystem.

Our Series C funding will help us continue building the financial market infrastructure of the future and accelerate our growth. We want to double the size of our team, expand our current product solutions and build new products that enterprises need. We’ll do this all while remaining 100% committed to regulation, reliability and security. 

To crystallize our goals in the coming year, we are measuring our progress against three specific objectives. We generally measure our progress on a monthly basis according to OKRs. It’s a system that our ex-Googler COO Andrew Chang implemented that has worked really well for us. Our goals for 2021 are:

• Grow tokenized assets under custody: This is an important measure of our progress and a signal of the utilization of digital assets. We have made it easy for assets to move back and forth between traditional and tokenized form. By providing greater utility, larger networks (with increasingly stronger network effects), and a wider range of asset classes, there will be even more reasons to keep assets in tokenized form. Today, our clients use our products to tokenize dollars into stablecoins for trading, they tokenize gold into PAX Gold for investing, and they use tokenized securities to settle trades. In the coming year, these and more use cases will all grow.

• Grow the team: We plan to hire at least 100 people to hit our targets. We need talented people across every function including engineering, product, marketing, compliance, operations, legal, data and HR. 

• Grow our trustworthiness: To support trusted brands around the world, we need to be the most trusted brand. We’ll continue to pursue more regulatory licensing (we have applied for a national trust bank charter and plan to for a clearing agency), third-party certifications (like our SOC 2 certification) and other important designations that show the market we are the safest and most reliable place to do business.

Our mission is big and our goals are lofty. We’re sharing our plans because we believe in transparency and accountability; we want our clients and partners to know where we stand and join us on our journey. Whether as a potential employee, partner or client, we need the best people and organizations in our ecosystem to power the financial system of the future. Join us!