VanEck subsidiary invests in UK analytics startup CryptoCompare

British crypto analytics startup CryptoCompare has secured a strategic investment from MV Index Solutions (MVIS), a subsidiary of New York-based asset manager VanEck.

The details of the investment were not disclosed, but a person familiar with the matter said it gives MVIS “a significant stake” in CryptoCompare.

“We are seeking to partner with leading firms in digital assets and blockchain technology and are happy to deepen that relationship by investing, when appropriate,” said Jan Van Eck, CEO of VanEck.

CryptoCompare sells real-time and historical data on over 5,000 tokens and more than 250,000 currency pairs to both institutional and retail investors. Its data APIs are widely used within the digital assets sector.

The London-based startup has been working closely with MVIS on crypto index products since 2017, when it launched the MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 100 Index. That index tracks the performance of the 100 largest digital assets and serves as a benchmark for other crypto indices.

In April of this year, the pair licensed the MVIS CryptoCompare Ethereum Benchmark Rate and the MVIS CryptoCompare Bitcoin Benchmark Rate indices to 3iQ, the Canadian digital assets investment manager which recently launched Canada’s first crypto exchange-traded funds.

“As the leading data provider for digital assets we are excited to reaffirm our relationship with VanEck and MVIS, who are pioneering incumbent moves in digital assets,” said Charles Hayter, CEO and co-founder of CryptoCompare. 

MVIS offers a range of indices covering several asset classes including equity, fixed income, and digital assets. As of April 23 this year, approximately $28.76 billion was invested in products based on its indices. MVIS’s parent company VanEck, which was founded in 1955, had $71.2 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2021.

The person with knowledge of the CryptoCompare investment said it had been agreed to late last year but didn’t close until earlier this week.

Since then, in line with the wider market, CryptoCompare has enjoyed a period of rapid growth. The company now has 430 paying data clients including regulators, financial institutions, and fintech and crypto unicorns. It is helping to run 40 indices with over £4 billion in assets under management.