In all of these cases, cryptocurrencies still don’t move through our network. Our crypto partners convert the digital assets on their end to traditional currencies, then transmit them through to the Mastercard network. Our change to supporting digital assets directly will allow many more merchants to accept crypto — an ability that’s currently limited by proprietary methods unique to each digital asset. This change will also cut out inefficiencies, letting both consumers and merchants avoid having to convert back and forth between crypto and traditional to make purchases.
Added to this work, Mastercard is actively engaging with several major central banks around the world, as they review plans to launch new digital currencies, dubbed CBDCs, to offer their citizens a new way to pay.
Blockchain risk management startup TRM Labs today announced it has raised $60 million in new funding led by Tiger Global to support its mission to combat cryptocurrency fraud and financial crime.
The Series B funding round also saw participation from a number of investors, among them credit card and payment processing companies including Visa Inc., American Express’s Amex Ventures, Citi Ventures, Block (formerly Square Inc.) and PayPal Ventures.
TRM Labs provides sophisticated analytics systems to financial operations that allow them to track blockchain-based assets such as cryptocurrencies to mitigate risk and comply with regulations.
To be completely clear, not all of today’s cryptocurrencies will be supported on our network. While stablecoins are more regulated and reliable than in the recent past, many of the hundreds of digital assets in circulation still need to tighten their compliance measures, so they won’t meet our requirements. We expect consumers and the ecosystem as a whole will start to rally around the crypto assets that offer reliability and security.
It’s those very same stablecoins that we expect to bring into our network.
What are we looking for? Four key items.
First and foremost we need consumer protections, including privacy and security of consumers’ information — the same level of security people have come to expect in their credit cards.
San Francisco – TRM, the cryptocurrency risk management platform, today announced that it has secured $4.2 million in funding from Initialized Capital, Blockchain Capital, PayPal Ventures, and Y Combinator, bringing the total raised in its seed round to $5.9 million.
“At TRM, we are fueled by a fundamental belief that cryptocurrency and blockchain can democratize access to financial services and empower billions of people,” said Esteban Castaño, co-founder and CEO of TRM Labs. “By building solutions to prevent cryptocurrency fraud and financial crime, we enable this vision and build a safer financial system for billions of people.”
The growth of cryptocurrencies is a global phenomenon and brings both opportunities and new risks to financial institutions.
As for government agencies, TRM also provides a forensics investigation product that allows for deep tracking of transactions related to scams, hacks and terrorist financing.
Since TRM’s launch from Y Combinator in 2019, its team has expanded from four people to 60. According to the company, its expertise includes experts from the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service and Europol, plus data scientists from Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc.
and Google LLC.
The company also boasts that it has seen its revenue increase more than 600% year-over-year since its launch, though it didn’t provide absolute numbers.
According to DeFiPulse.com, a website that tracks the decentralized finance industry and its underlying crypto assets and blockchains, the underlying value of the entire market exceeded $111 billion in November – a significant jump from $30 billion in January.
Blockchain Capital, and executives from Google followed up.
TRM Labs integrates more than a dozen blockchains, aiming to utilize blockchain technology to detect signs of financial crimes, such as fraud and money laundering, in real-time and to help financial institutions, cryptocurrency companies, and public institutions to deal with corresponding risk management.
Ethan Kurzweil, a partner of Bessemer Venture Partners and a member of TRM’s board of directors, said:
“The team at TRM Labs is building an extraordinary company that is going to be critically important in helping financial institutions safely transition to a new financial system for the digital age.”
Recently, on June 9, JBS, the world’s largest meat producer based in Brazil, revealed the company had paid hackers a ransom of about $11 million worth of Bitcoin to solve the ransomware.
The platform integrates with more than twelve blockchains, analyses billions of virtual transactions at a time, detects signs of fraud and financial crimes in real-time.
TRM labs will use the new funding to expand the engineering and data science teams, accelerate product development, and move into new markets.
Rahul Raina, the CTO, and co-founder of TRM Labs, has said that PayPal’s strategic investment in their platform shows their ‘continued commitment to ensuring safety and compliance as the digital payments landscape evolves and innovates’.
TRM will also continue to be a strong partner to law enforcement and regulators around the globe as they work to ensure that illicit actors don’t take advantage of this new financial system.”
TRM’s platform integrates with more than a dozen blockchains, and analyzes billions of virtual asset transactions to detect in real-time signs of fraud and financial crime like money laundering. The increase in adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies worldwide is driving global, financial institutions including major banks, brokerages, and exchanges across US, Latin America, Asia, and Europe to turn to TRM for cryptocurrency compliance and risk management solutions.
To do this, TRM supports more than 90,000 digital assets across 23 blockchains, including nonfungible tokens, which can represent the ownership of digital artwork, digital collectibles, virtual game items and more.
“Crypto is moving faster than any sector in our lifetimes,” said Esteban Castaño, co-founder and chief executive of TRM. “Organizations need a blockchain intelligence partner that can stay ahead of the evolving risk landscape — from ransomware attacks to decentralized finance exploits.”
Customers of TRM include cryptocurrency exchanges such as Circle and FTX US, which use TRM Transaction Monitoring, a service that allows companies to quickly detect suspicious transactions and stay in line with anti-money-laundering regulations.
He also stated that TRM Labs is a mission-oriented platform that is capable of bridging the worlds of ‘traditional finance, compliance, and crypto to tackle the critical problem’, and their company has full faith in TRM Labs.
General Partner at Blockchain Capital, Spencer Bogart, said that TRM Labs provides a solution for every financial institution in today’s world because the institutions are ‘either establishing plans to engage directly with crypto or they have customers and partnerships which in some way or another are exposed to crypto transactions’.
Blockchain Capital has led the initial round of funding organized by TRM Labs at the beginning of this year (in the month of January). Texas Capital, The MBA Fund, and Green D Ventures have also been a part of the funding that resulted in raising $1.7 million in that round.
