O’Melveny Helps Bitwave Crypto Compliance Platform on Fundraise

As FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried sits in a Bahamian jail, crypto compliance platform Bitwave is planning a new product designed to help businesses with digital asset accounting, backed by $15 million from a new funding round announced last week.

O’Melveny & Myers advised Bitwave on the Series A round led by venture capital firms Hack VC and Blockchain Capital, according to a statement from the four-year-old startup based in San Francisco.

The new product, Bitwave Institutional, will be targeted at custodians, exchanges, financial institutions, wealth managers, and other organizations “exposed to the enormous risk, regulatory, and control complexities around holding, managing, and investing users’ digital assets,” the company said in announcing the funding round.

The statement doesn’t mention the compliance problems of FTX, formerly the world’s biggest crypto exchange, or its former chief executive officer Bankman-Fried, who faces fraud and other charges, or other crypto exchanges that recently went bankrupt.

Venture capital and private equity firms that participated in the funding round include SignalFire, Valor Equity Partners, Arca, Pulsar Trading, and Alumni Ventures Blockchain Fund.

O’Melveny said its team advising Bitwave on the funding round was led by Silicon Valley M&A partner Brian Covotta and associate Amit Itai.

Bitwave Institutional will build on the company’s current product that aids functions such as tax accounting, bookkeeping, according to the statement. Customers include nonfungible token marketplace OpenSea, New York-based seed fund Compound, and digital asset technology company Marathon Digital Holdings, Bitwave said.