a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator joins $3.2 million seed round for OpenTrade
Companies • April 9, 2024, 12:01PM EDT
Published 1 minute earlier on
Quick Take
- OpenTrade, a web3 institutional lending and yield products platform, raised $3.2 million in seed funding.
- a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX), CMCC Global, Draper Dragon, Ryze Labs, and Plassa Capital are among the participants in the round.
OpenTrade, an on-chain institutional lending and yield products platform, raised $3.2 million in seed funding. The a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX) participated in the round. Other backers include CMCC Global, Draper Dragon, Ryze Labs and Plassa Capital. OpenTrade's total funding to date is now $4.45 million, and the firm intends to use its fresh financing to grow its team across all key functions, the firm's co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Jeff Handler told The Block. OpenTrade is built on the payment and DeFi infrastructure from Circle, the stablecoin issuer behind "OpenTrade's solutions are truly unique in the market in that we are the only company that has built a truly enterprise-grade B2B2C product that allows CEX's and Neobanks to deploy RWA-backed yield products that they can then offer to all of their existing users, all within their existing platform and apps," Handler said. "This is extremely valuable for companies that are using USDC to power digital dollar accounts for users outside of the U.S." "These companies want to extend their products with ways for their users to earn stable, predicate yield, but only if it is backed by both assets and operating models that they can trust, and done in a way that doesn't exclude wide groups of users from being able to participate," Handler continued. OpenTrade is based in the UK and went out of stealth in February 2023. Three months later, the firm raised $1.5 million in funding led by Sino Global Capital, with additional support from Circle Ventures, Kronos Research, Kyber Ventures, Polygon Ventures and Outlier Ventures. OpenTrade partnered with the crypto exchange WOO X to provide tokenized U.S. Treasury builds in Asian markets in September 2023. Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures. © 2023 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
USDC
-0.13%
and EURC. Through OpenTrade, regulated asset managers can create on-chain lending products that can bear yield, depositing USDC or EURC into on-chain vaults with certain investment criteria and target yields, according to the firm's website.
About Author
MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.
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