Digital Assets Data raises $6 million to be the Bloomberg and Github of cryptocurrency data

Digital Assets Data just secured a fresh $6 million in funding to ramp up its enterprise-facing data services operation.

Announced on Tuesday, this seed round is supported by Digital Currency Group, Galaxy Digital, CMT Digital, Jump Capital, Morgan Creek, Ritholtz Wealth Management CEO Joshua Brown and other investors.

Founded in 2018, Digital Assets Data offers access to analytical tools for crypto asset data, which its CEO Mike Alfred hopes will solve two of the biggest problems hanging over crypto investors: poor data quality and the hassle of managing large quantities of data.

“We don’t see enough investment [in crypto data analytics] relative to the opportunities, but we think it's a multi-billion dollar market in the next three to five years,” Alfred told The Block in an interview. “When everybody is distracted with trading and exchanges, they are allowing an opportunity for somebody like us to build essentially the number one player in this space.”

Launched in early March, Digital Assets Data’s software collects large quantities of on-chain, market, and reference data related to crypto assets and hosts them in a development environment. This means that firms can not only access crypto market data through Digital Assets Data's platform but also code various analytical tools on it. 

Currently, there are several other crypto data providers in the market, including Coinbase-backed Nomics and Coin Metrics, which just raised $1.9 million in February. Alfred says its product is differentiated from the competition because it is more like Bloomberg, the provider of terminals that line Wall Street trading floors combined with Github, a community of developers for sharing and building software. This means that instead of only receiving data feeds through APIs, developers can also build different analytical models on the company’s platform, which allows firms to tailor it to their specific needs.

“We are really providing a platform as opposed to a set of data,” says Alfred. “APIs are valuable, but they are only valuable if you have the infrastructure to ingest that information and utilize it to your business. Today the vast majority of digital asset firms don’t have high-quality data layout inside their organization, so using an API is not really that useful. What they need is a platform that can ingest all the data.”

Currently, Digital Assets Data has around 22 engineers dedicated to building its data platform. With this fresh injection of capital, the company is looking into expanding its product offering. They are also in talks with several investors about a “much larger” Series A “in the near future,” according to Alfred.

“You need $6 million to build the type of platform we are building and we are going to need tens of millions of dollars more in the short term to finish the vision,” says Alfred. “$6 million is significant, but given the market that we are trying to address, it’s just the beginning.”

Alfred says that the vision of Digital Assets Data is to be “the primary place” where crypto businesses “express their investment thinking, and effectively run their businesses relevant to digital asset using our platform as the back end.”

Disclosure: Digital Assets Data is an investor in The Block.