Big Wall Street Players Investing in Bitcoin Startup

Not only has venture capital investing in Bitcoin failed to slow even as the price of the digital currency has slumped, but now some big Wall Street names have hopped on the bandwagon.
On Tuesday Bitcoin payments and wallet platform Coinbase announced it had raised $75 million in Series C funding. That’s more than double the previous amount of venture capital invested in a Bitcoin company. San Francisco-based Coinbase has now raised a total of $106 million.
But this time it wasn’t just the usual Bitcoin-friendly VC firms backing Coinbase.
Topping the list is the venerable New York Stock Exchange, a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (NYSE: ICE).
“With this investment, we are tapping into a new asset class by teaming up with a leading platform that is bringing transparency, security, and confidence to an important growth market,” NYSE president Tom Farley said in a statement.
Two other traditional names investing in Coinbase were financial services company USAA and Spanish banking giant Banco Bilbao Viscaya Argentaria SA (NYSE: BBVA). Japanese telecom firm NTT Docomo, Inc. (NYSE: DCM) also joined the round.
And two high-profile individuals put money into Coinbase: Former Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) CEO Vikram Pandit and former Thomson Reuters Corp. (NYSE:TRI) CEO Tom Glocer.

This post was published at Nasdaq on January 22, 2015,.