Fidelity Joins $1.9 Million Round in Blockchain Data Startup Coin Metrics

Blockchain analytics startup Coin Metrics has closed a $1.9 million seed round with Fidelity Investments, Highland Capital Partners and Dragonfly Capital.

Coin Metrics co-founder and board chairman Nic Carter told CoinDesk that institutional investors aren't satisfied with the current crop of price aggregation services that don't distinguish the integrity of different data sets.

Aside from looking at exchange activity and prices, Coin Metrics also analyzes blockchain data with a methodology that aims to help traders cut through the noise, as Carter put it.

Rice will strive to translate traditional securities metrics to the cryptocurrency market.

Dragonfly Capital co-founder Alex Pack told CoinDesk he's eager to see more mature metrics applied to the space.

"But the thing we liked most about Coin Metrics is they are crypto natives who have been around for years with a nonprofit, open source model."

Chainalysis, the incumbent startup in the space, raised $30 million earlier this month to expand services in Europe.

Those two firms focus on tracking bad actors and helping businesses comply with regulations more than providing investment insights like Coin Metrics.

Squarely in the institutional investor space is the analytics startup Flipside Crypto, which raised $4.5 million in November 2018 from Coinbase Ventures and others.

Coin Metrics started out as an open source hobby project in 2017 with its two cofounders - Carter and software engineer Aleksei Nokhrin - spending the subsequent years bootstrapping before this modest raise.