Young Platform densifies the French crypto market

Italian FinTech Young Platform, which created a platform for managing and investing in crypto-currencies, has just announced that it has raised a large amount of money to accelerate its internationalisation. Among its target countries, France. A deployment that contrasts a priori with the current crisis observed on the crypto-currency markets, but which confirms the potential that investors continue to see in the long term.

FACTS

• Young Platform has closed its new investment round for an amount of €16 million. This round of financing was notably carried out with Azimut, one of Europe's leading independent asset managers with over €83 billion in total assets.

• Young Platform previously operated in Italy, where it offered a platform of digital products capable of facilitating access to the crypto-currency market.

• Its offering is distinguished by its educational approach and its efforts to popularise content on blockchain technology and its applications. It also supports a unique system of rewarding its customers via its own digital currency YNG.

• With these new funds, Young Platform will now offer its services outside its historical Italian borders, in particular in France and Spain.

• However, the FinTech says it is still waiting for its PSAN registration for the moment.

• Young Platform also plans to recruit new employees to increase its team from 41 to 110 by the end of 2022.

CHALLENGES

• Building on very rapid growth to push its advantage more widely in Europe: Young Platform raised its first round of funding for an amount of €3.5 million in June 2021. Since then, it has become one of the top three crypto-currency trading platforms in Italy, with a 36% market share, and is growing significantly. As a result, the company had more than one million users at the end of the first quarter of 2022 and was managing a transaction volume of €200 million at the end of December 2021.

• Democratising crypto-assets: The main objective of Young Platform's fundraising is to simplify and expand access to the world of crypto-currencies. To achieve this, the platform intends to develop its model towards that of an alternative, digital bank focused on new financial services.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• The crypto-currency market is currently hit by a deep crisis, highlighted in the news by the historic fall in the price of bitcoin.

• But Young Platform prefers to highlight the opportunities of its market in the longer term. The FinTech company highlights the fact that the cypto-asset market has almost tripled in value by 2021, rising from $772 billion on 1 January to $2.19 trillion on 31 December.

• The outlook remains broad as globally, more than a third of Millennials believe crypto-currencies will replace cash and cards according to data from Deutsche Bank. Nearly 8% of French people also own crypto-currencies and 30% of French people are considering acquiring them, according to a study by consultancy firm KPMG