In the latest major DeFi raise, Pendle Finance has raised enough to bring their vision of a secondary market for tokenized yield to the DeFi space.
Pendle Finance Ushers in Defi Primitive
In a round led by some of the biggest names in DeFi investment, Pendle Finance has raised $3.5 million.
The round was led by Mechanism Capital with participation from CMS, DeFi Alliance, Spartan Group, Crypto.com, and several other firms. Pendle is creating a protocol that will allow users to separate their future yields from their yield-bearing assets and then trade these future yields in an automated market maker (AMM).
On this AMM, users will be able to trade future yield tokens, letting DeFi investors choose to sacrifice future revenue for immediate profit.
With yield-bearing assets being a major part of the DeFi ecosystem, Pendle Capital’s project is sure to bring a lot of attention as it approaches launch.
“Driven by the emergence of ever-increasing yield products in DeFi, our AMM will function as a secondary market for these assets. By giving everybody the ability to easily hedge, trade, and arbitrage yield, we allow our users to actively manage their exposure,” said Pendle’s CEO in a press release shared with Crypto Briefing.
Disclaimer: The author held ETH and a number of other cryptocurrencies at the time of writing. One or more members of Crypto Briefing’s management team has invested in Pendle Finance.
StarkWare has raised $75 million in its series B funding round, according to an announcement from the firm on Twitter.
Top VC Funds Lead Series B
Paradigm led this round of funding, just as it did during StarkWare’s Series A round in 2018. Other returning investors include Pantera Capital, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, DCVC, and Wing Capital.
StarkWare also attracted Three Arrows Capital and Alameda Research as investors for the first time.
Previous seed rounds and funding rounds have raised approximately $36 million for StarkWare. The new batch of $75 million brings the company’s total raised capital up to $111 million.
StarkWare has also partnered with notable Ethereum firms and projects such as ConsenSys, Infura, and Metamask.
Scaling Ethereum
StarkWare has numerous projects underway, largely focused around ZK-starks, which are used to scale up blockchains like Ethereum.
Ethereum has suffered from numerous congestion issues, largely brought on by the rising popularity of DeFi apps in the summer of 2020. The Ethereum network is now saturated by thousands of retail investors who are using DeFi exchanges and dApps in search of lucrative financial opportunities.
Ethereum also has native scaling improvements underway, such as proof-of-stake and sharding. However, StarkWare is one of the most notable second-layer efforts working on the issue.
Disclaimer: The author held ETH at the time of writing.
