Fabric is a startup that focuses on e-commerce platform development, and recently, it has raised as much as $100 million in new funding. The round was spearheaded by Stripes, which is a private equity firm based in New York. It included various new investors like B Capital Group and Greycroft.

The Value of Fabric is Now Set at $850 Million

According to experts who specialize in the field, Fabric has raised its value from $193 million to $850 million. The startup allows companies to customize their own websites with back-end technology and digital storefronts that allow them to facilitate online transactions. Chief Executive Officer Faisal Masud has stated that the surge in e-commerce demand pointed out the importance of robust digital technology and the lack of sufficient resources & engineering talent many companies need to improve their websites. According to him, product owners should focus on their products and not running their platforms, and the latter is exactly what Fabric can do for them.

Fabric Is Now Being Used By More Than Two Dozen Customers

According to Masud, Fabric has been useful to many companies already. Its clients include Restoration Hardware, GNC, and BarkBox. The startup will use this latest surge in funding to hire a marketing leadership team and expand its existing engineering team. The company will also broaden partnerships and support possible acquisitions, and it also looks forward to expanding in Asia.

Fabric was founded back in 2017 by Ryan Bartley, who had done work at eBay and Staples. Currently, he is the chief revenue officer at Fabric. While his company works with many consumer-facing websites, its growth is likely to come from companies that are doing business-to-business work. According to Ron Shah, who is a partner at Stripes, Fabric benefits greatly from a leadership team with vast experience working for technology giants like Google and Amazon. Apparently, this is vital for this kind of market because it is hard to stay relevant with the rapid pace of change in the industry.

Despite all the talk of democratizing finance, a handful of rich investors apparently hold huge amounts of the cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin. The data that the National Bureau of Economic Research has recently released shows that some 10,000 individual investors control around a third of all the Bitcoin in circulation.

The Top 1,000 Cryptocurrency Investors Are Popularly Known as Whales and Control Around 3 Million Bitcoin Tokens

This new research on the Bitcoin market expands on prior studies and distinguishes between intermediaries like cryptocurrency traders, exchanges, and brokers who process vast amounts of the cryptocurrency and individually-held accounts. While intermediaries control some 5.5 million Bitcoin and individuals have around 8.5 million Bitcoin, the top 1,000 investors own around 3 million of all Bitcoin tokens. Still, it is difficult to determine the degree of control those investors have, as there is no reliable record of who is actually behind those accounts.

Individuals Who Accumulated Huge Bitcoin Stockpiles Early On Are Considered to Be Among the Top Owners of the Cryptocurrency

It is believed that the people who own the accounts with the most Bitcoin tokens are individuals who managed to mine huge stockpiles of Bitcoin early on and kept getting richer in the years that followed. Still, most crypto enthusiasts seem to not care too much about the top players and their manipulations, so long as they keep their own financial trajectories going up in a similar fashion.

The report identified that scams and criminal activity involving the Bitcoin network are indeed substantial, but perhaps not quite on the same scale that authorities have claimed. The authors cautioned that the measurement of concentration is very likely an understatement because the possibility that the largest addresses are controlled by the same person could not be ruled out.

Apparently, the miners who use computers to farm and generate new Bitcoin tokens are even more concentrated. It seems the top 10% of miners are controlling some 90% of the mining capacity, and of them, just 0.1% control 50%. This tracks with the ever-increasing difficulty of mining new Bitcoins over time. It scales in terms of computational demand and has resulted in the appearance of large-scale Bitcoin farms that use huge stockpiles of special hardware to generate new units.