Fidelity Investments, Castle Island Ventures back blockchain analytics startup Coin Metrics

Coin Metrics, a Cambridge-based blockchain analytics startup, has raised $1.9 million in a seed funding round led by Castle Island Ventures.

The funding round also drew support from Fidelity Investments, Highland Capital Partners and Dragonfly Capital.

Founded in 2017, Coin Metrics provides transparent and actionable cryptoasset market and network data to various industry stakeholders including financial enterprises, funds, media and research outlets, and data/application providers. It aims to empower its clients and the public to better understand, value, use, and engage with blockchain based assets.

“Coin Metrics, Inc., delivers transparent and actionable data to various industry stakeholders,” Fidelity said in an online post. “We applaud their achievements and look forward to working alongside their talented team to interpret cryptoassets market and network data.”

Nic Carter and Aleksei Nokhrin founded Coin Metrics as an open source blockchain network data and analytics project. The company was incorporated in August 2018 and in November, Tim Rice joined as co-founding CEO.

Rice has previously held executive positions at Tradeweb, Moneyline Telerate, Thomson Reuters and Markit (now Markit IHS) and spent the past two years at ConsenSys where he gained invaluable insights into bridging the gap between crypto and traditional capital markets.

"All of our investors are bought into the idea that the next phase of cryptoasset investing requires robust comprehensive data and infrastructure. Having this premier group as investors is a great vote of confidence," Rice said.

“Coin Metrics is leveraging its groundbreaking work in on-chain network data by deploying the same rigor to exchange market data supported by a state-of-the-art data collection and delivery infrastructure."

Rice explained that the company will use the guiding principles from the IOSCO Benchmark for Financial Benchmarks for aggregating cryptoasset market data.

" We intend to bridge the wild west crypto market data world by translating fair value measurements, similar to FASB 157, meant to provide a credible confidence level assessment of fair value pricing for any particular market," Rice added.