NEAR-based wallet Sender reaches $45M valuation after a $4.5M funding led by Pantera Capital

Sender, a crypto wallet for the NEAR Protocol ecosystem, secured a $4.5 million investment from a funding round led by crypto hedge fund and investment company Pantera Capital.

According to a statement released on Monday, the new funding gave the wallet a valuation of $45 million to Sender, which used a token sale to structure the investment.

The company intends to use the funds to finance a wallet for institutional and corporate customers, node staking, a transaction aggregator for NFTs, and the integration of several decentralized exchanges to make token swapping easier. 

“Current market dynamics have proven to be a powerful catalyst for development, and Sender has many exciting features in our pipeline, and will bring more Web2 users into the Web3 world,” said Kenny Qi, the founder of Sender.

Qi expects that the features and capabilities of the platform will help it to exceed 10 million users by the next year.

Some of the features of Sender

Users of Sender’s noncustodial wallet can instantaneously swap tokens, stake them to possibly receive incentives, and hold NFTs. The platform can link to hardware wallets like Ledger and Keystone, as well as integrate crypto on-ramp providers like Moonpay, Banxa, and Transak, according to the statement. It claims to have received more than 500,000 downloads on desktop and mobile devices.

Commenting on the Sender’s capabilities, the general partner at Pantera Capital, Paul Veradittakit, said:

“As the leading crypto wallet in the NEAR ecosystem with a complete suite of browser plugins and iOS and Android apps, Sender is seeing tremendous user growth and we are excited to help them reach the next level.”

The deal was signed in April 2022, before the majority of the recent upheaval that the cryptocurrency industry has experienced. This year, token prices have suffered, and several significant crypto businesses, like as the Terra blockchain, the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, and the lending company Celsius, have collapsed in recent months.

Notably, as TheCoinRise reported, Pantera Capital also led a $65 million Series A funding round in July for Unstoppable Domains.