Decentralized Finance
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Crypto startup Phantom banks funding from Andreessen Horowitz to scale its multichain wallet
While retail investors grew more comfortable buying cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2021, the decentralized application world still has a lot of work to do when it comes to onboarding a mainstream user base.
Phantom is part of a new class of crypto startups looking to build infrastructure that streamlines blockchain-based applications and provides a more user-friendly UX for navigating the crypto world, something that can make the entire space more approachable to a non-developer audience. Users can download the Phantom wallet to their browsers to interact with applications, swap tokens and collect NFTs.
The crypto wallet startup has banked a $9 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with Variant Fund, Jump Capital, DeFi Alliance, Solana Foundation and Garry Tan also participating. The round, which closed earlier this summer, comes as some venture capital firms embrace a crypto future even as volatility continues to envelop the broader market. Last month, a16z announced a whopping 2.2 billion crypto fund, the firm’s largest vertical-specific investment vehicle ever.
Image via Phantom
The co-founding team of CEO Brandon Millman, CPO Chris Kalani and CTO Francesco Agosti all come aboard from crypto infrastructure startup 0x.
At the moment, Phantom is best-known among the Solana community, where it has become the go-to wallet for applications on that blockchain. The startup’s ambition is to interface with more and more networks, currently building out compatibility with Ethereum and looking to embrace other blockchains, aiming to be a product built for a “multichain world,” Millman tells TechCrunch.
Alongside building out support for other networks, Phantom wants to build more sophisticated DeFi mechanisms right into their wallet, allowing users to stake cryptocurrencies and swap more tokens inside the wallet.
The startup says they have some 40,000 users of their existing wallet product.
Building out a presence on the popular Ethereum blockchain, which already has a handful of popular wallet providers, will be a challenge, but Phantom’s broadest challenge is helping a new breed of crypto-curious users interface with a network of apps that still have a long way to go when it comes to being mainstream-friendly.
“The entire space is kind of stuck in this ‘built by developers for other developers mode,’ ” Millman says. “This bar has been kind of stuck there, and no one is really stepping up to push the bar up higher.”
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Binance Labs leads $1.6M seed round in DeFi startup MOUND, the developer of Pancake Bunny
Decentralized finance startup MOUND, known for its yield farming aggregator Pancake Bunny, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding led by Binance Labs. Other participants included IDEO CoLab, SparkLabs Korea and Handshake co-founder Andrew Lee.
Built on Binance Smart Chain, a blockchain for developing high-performance DeFi apps, MOUND says Pancake Bunny now has more than 30,000 daily average users, and has accumulated more than $2.1 billion in total value locked (TVL) since its launch in December 2020.
The new funding will be used to expand Pancake Bunny and develop new products. MOUND recently launched Smart Vaults and plans to unveil Cross-Chain Collateralization in about a month, bringing the startup closer to its goal of covering a wide range of DeFi use cases, including farming, lending and swapping.
Smart Vaults are for farming single asset yields on leveraged lending products. It also automatically checks if the cost of leveraging may be more than anticipated returns and can actively lend assets for MOUND’s cross-chain farming.
Cross-Chain Collateralization is cross-chain yield farming that lets users keep original assets on their native blockchain instead of relying on a bridge token. The user’s original assets serve as collateral when the Bunny protocol borrows assets on the Binance Smart Chain for yield farming. This allows users to keep assets on native blockchains while giving them liquidity to generate returns on the Binance Smart Chain.
In a statement, Wei Zhou, Binance chief financial officer, and head of Binance Labs and M&A’s, said “Pancake Bunny’s growth and MOUND’s commitment to execution are impressive. Team MOUND’s expertise in live product design and service was a key factor in our decision to invest. We look forward to expanding the horizons of Defi together with MOUND.”
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Coinbase announces USDC Bootstrap Fund to support DeFi projects
Coinbase is announcing a new initiative called the USDC Bootstrap Fund. As the name suggests, the company wants to support developers with a fund composed of USDC tokens.
DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, is a recent trend in the blockchain space. DeFi projects are traditional financial products that you’d expect from a traditional bank, such as lending protocols and derivatives, built on top of a blockchain.
Thanks to the decentralized nature of these protocols, it’s harder to censor them and more people should theoretically be able to access those services.
Going back to Coinbase, the company thinks there’s not enough liquidity for some DeFi protocols. The startup wants to improve that by investing USDC directly in DeFi protocols. Those investments are smart contracts, and returns should be provided by a counterparty, such as a borrower or taker.
In other words, it’ll become much easier to borrow USDC using some DeFi protocols as Coinbase is providing a pool of USDC tokens. Counterparties will have to provide crypto collateral and pay some interest rate.
Coinbase is also announcing its first two investments through the USDC Bootstrap Fund. The company is handing 1 million in USDC to Compound, and 1 million in USDC to dYdX.
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