Chinese ethereum wallet startup imToken has raised a $10 million
Series A from IDG Capital as it seeks to expand its product offering and
finance international expansion into Asia, Africa, and the United
States.
The Hangzhou-based company, which was founded in 2016, claims to be the world’s largest ethereum wallet, with more than 4 million monthly active users and support for 30,000 tokens.
ImToken says that $35 billion worth of funds have been stored in the
app over the past calendar year, which is 75 percent more than the “more
than $20 billion” that Coinbase has said its customers have stored on its platform. Self-reported data
also indicates that imToken users account for approximately 10 percent
of all ethereum transactions.
“imToken has developed its product into one of the top crypto asset
wallets in the world with such a sound reputation. We believe it will
become a significant infrastructure for the tokenization manifesto,
benefitting both the crypto economy and blockchain technology,” IDG
Capital’s Young Guo was
quoted as saying in a press statement.
According to Bloomberg, 70 percent of imToken’s user base comes from China, and the company has said that IDG’s
funding will be used to bootstrap international adoption. The firm will
open an office in Singapore that will focus on expansion into Southeast
Asia, after which it intends to expand into the rest of Asia as well as
African countries where the app already has a core user group. Finally,
the firm will make a global push, expanding into the US and other
regions.
Though available to Western users, the app has yet to make much of a dent in this market. At present, the app has approximately 100,000 installs from the Google Play store — which is not readily available in China — along with a four-star rating.
ImToken also intends to use the funds to expand the range of assets
supported by the mobile wallet. The company recently rolled out support
for bitcoin (including SegWit), and it also intends to develop compatibility with EOS and other blockchains.
