South Korean crypto fintech firm raises $25M in a funding round co-led by Galaxy Digital

Terraform Labs, a South Korean crypto fintech firm, has recently raised $25 million in a new funding round co-led by Michael Novogratz's Galaxy Digital. The company plans to use the additional capital to develop new DeFi projects, enhance the platform’s interoperability with other blockchains, and expand its business to other markets.

Galaxy Digital co-led a funding round that raised $25 million for the crypto firm Terraform Labs, according to CoinDesk. Aside from Galaxy, other well-known names in the crypto space such as Coinbase Ventures and Pantera Capital have invested in the South Korean firm joining previous investors that include Hashed, Arrington XRP, and Kenetic Capital.

“What’s great about Terra is they are one of the first sandbox experiments that’s getting outside the sandbox,” Novogratz explained his decision to invest in the company, according to SeekingAlpha. However, the company did not disclose just how much it invested in Terraform.

Novogratz is confident that Terraforms has what it takes to compete in a market already crowded with existing mobile apps, such as KakaoPay. “These guys are going to dominate payments in Southeast Asia,” he added.

Hashed CEO Simon Kim echoed Novogratz sentiments by saying that Terraform’s product is already tried and tested in the market. “Terra has already made a successful payment case for more than 2 million users in the Korean market, and is also rapidly growing in the DeFi space,” Kim said in a press release.

Unlike other crypto projects that already received funding but haven’t yet launched their products, Terraform already has a product with a sizable following. Its payments platform is already popular in South Korea.

Terraform’s technology, which runs on top of a digital ledger and a related wallet using the stablecoin called Luna, has greatly reduced payment settlement from days to just around 6 seconds. The platform now has 2.2 million users with an average of almost 90,000 transactions daily.

“We look forward to using the funds for building key pieces of infrastructure in the Mirror Protocol for synthetics, Anchor Protocol for savings, and other killer DeFi applications to make Terra’s algorithmic stablecoins the centerpiece of the decentralized finance movement,” said Terraform’s co-founder Do Kwon. Aside from expanding its product line, he also revealed that the company will use part of the proceeds of the round to fund its expansion into Taiwan and Thailand.