Latest news with #PolychainCapital
Yahoo
23-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
DeFi company Blueprint Finance raises $9.5 million from Polychain Capital
Unlike in traditional finance, it isn't as easy as letting money sit in a savings account to earn interest on your crypto holdings. In order to see a return in the crypto space, holders have to go through a number of complicated steps to engage programs where they can loan out their crypto to borrowers with interest. That's why Blueprint Finance, a crypto startup based in New York, is seeking to make it easier for crypto investors to put their holdings to work. The company announced on Monday that it has raised $9.5 million in a funding round led by Polychain Capital with participation from YZi Labs, formerly Binance Labs, and VanEck. Blueprint Finance, founded by CEO Nic Roberts-Huntley in 2023, has released two products, called Concrete and Glow, that aim to allow crypto investors to make money on their holdings through the use of decentralized finance, or DeFi. DeFi refers to any financial service, like lending or borrowing, that is conducted on a blockchain and without the involvement of a central bank. A popular form of DeFi is lending and borrowing, where investors can earn interest on their crypto holdings by lending their crypto out to borrowers in need of short-term capital. The borrowers pledge to provide a return on that loan. In order to ensure that lenders will get their money back, borrowers collateralize the loan with their own crypto. If the value of their collateral falls below a certain threshold, the borrower is automatically liquidated meaning they are forced to repay the loan and their collateral is sold. Blueprint Finance, and other DeFi companies, seek to eliminate the complexities and maximize the returns that come from these programs with their own products. 'The big premise here is, how do we give anybody, institutional down to pure retail, the easiest access and the best utility from their digital assets in terms of return on their capital?,' Roberts-Huntley told Fortune. Concrete, Blueprint Finance's first product released in early 2024, is specifically tailored to lending and borrowing on any blockchain that uses the Ethereum virtual machine like Ethereum, Base, and Polygon. Earlier this year, Blueprint Finance launched its second product called Glow, which is a rebranded and updated version of a Solana blockchain-based lending platform called Jet Protocol which Blueprint Finance acquired in 2024. Glow focuses on allowing investors in the Solana ecosystem to lend, borrow, and trade within one platform. Concrete and Glow both produce revenue by charging a performance fee when an investor receives a return on their loan as well as fees for managing the lending and borrowing process. In recent years, the crypto lending market has ballooned into an over $36 billion industry, and numerous companies are trying to capitalize on the growing institutional interest in DeFi services. In 2023, the leading crypto exchange in the U.S. Coinbase, launched a lending program specifically for its institutional customers. There are other popular lending programs available to average retail investors like Morpho and Aave. Blueprint Finance will spend the money raised in this round on hiring new employees, engineering and marketing, Roberts-Huntley said. Roberts-Huntley declined to disclose the company's annual revenue and its valuation in this round. Blueprint Finance previously raised $7.5 million in 2024, bringing the company's total funding to date to $17 million. This story was originally featured on
Associated Press
23-06-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Blueprint Finance Raises Additional $9.5 Million to Build the Next Generation of DeFi Infrastructure Solutions
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 23, 2025-- Today, Blueprint Finance, a multi-chain DeFi infrastructure company and the core developer of both the Ethereum-based Concrete and Solana-based Glow Finance, announced it has raised a fresh $9.5 million in funding led by Polychain Capital, including a strategic investment from Yzi Labs (formerly Binance Labs). To date, Blueprint has raised more than $17 million. This raise includes participation from other leading investment and venture capital firms in the industry, including VanEck, Selini Capital, Portal Ventures, Auros, Halo Capital, Leadblock Bitpanda Ventures, BitGo, and Gate Ventures, among others. Following last year's $7.5M raise, Blueprint Finance emerged from stealth to launch Concrete, an Ethereum-based protocol building next-generation infrastructure for DeFi-native asset management. The platform enables developers, DAOs, and institutional allocators to launch, manage, and scale composable, tokenized on-chain portfolios, which also serve as the foundation for new derivative assets. Since launching earlier this year, Concrete has released a series of products that include liquidity bootstrapping campaigns for new networks as well as yield strategy vaults that have collectively gained over $650m in TVL. The funds in this round will be used to enable the continued growth of the Concrete and Glow protocols, scale new products, increase institutional adoption, and facilitate go-to-market expansion. This raise comes on the heels of Blueprint's expansion into the Solana ecosystem with the recent launch of Glow Finance in April. Glow was born from Blueprint's acquisition of Jet Protocol, a Solana-native lending platform, in October 2024, which now serves as the substructure for the Glow protocol. Building upon this layer, Glow will introduce novel mechanisms such as portable margin accounts, automated yield vaults, and staking markets, while continuing to develop new features and soon-to-be-released new products. 'This round of fundraising comes at a time of rapid growth for our team,' said Nic Roberts-Huntley, CEO and co-founder of Blueprint Finance. 'We've shipped two protocols on two of the most important and active ecosystems in DeFi, and this capital gives us the continued ability to build and serve both retail users and institutional-grade investors at scale.' 'The DeFi industry is entering a period of maturation marked by more sustainable growth, better risk management, and a strong focus on usability,' said Josh Rosenthal, general partner at Polychain Capital. 'Blueprint Finance is building protocols designed with institutional-grade security and liquidity considerations in mind. The new era of DeFi, ushered in by protocols like Concrete and Glow, is set to meet the rising demand of an industry transitioning into a foundational component of the broader financial system.' The Blueprint Finance team is composed of veterans from leading firms in both traditional finance and Web3, including Point72, Morgan Stanley, Consensys, and Coinbase. Additionally, the team has made a number of strategic new hires, including: Chief Growth Officer, Luke Hajdukiewicz, former Head of Sales at EigenLayer; Head of Product, Graeme Barnes, former Head of Product at Maple; Senior Smart Contract Engineer, Haythem Sellami, former Smart Contract Lead at Euler; and Engineering Manager, Gustavo Silva, former Staff Technical Lead at Consensys. About Blueprint Finance Blueprint Finance designs institutional-caliber DeFi solutions through its dual-protocol system. Concrete powers tokenized DeFi native asset management and the creation of new derivatives for any asset, while Glow powers yield, trading, and lending on Solana. Since launch, Blueprint has secured over $650M in total value locked by streamlining sophisticated financial engineering with intuitive user experiences. The company's quantitative framework transforms complex DeFi mechanisms into products that work reliably for both institutions and individuals alike. By eliminating traditional DeFi pain points like liquidation risk and capital fragmentation, Blueprint is building the technical foundation for broader institutional adoption of decentralized finance. View source version on [email protected] KEYWORD: UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA NEW YORK INDUSTRY KEYWORD: PROFESSIONAL SERVICES TECHNOLOGY CRYPTOCURRENCY FINANCE FINTECH DIGITAL CASH MANAGEMENT/DIGITAL ASSETS SOURCE: Blueprint Finance Copyright Business Wire 2025. PUB: 06/23/2025 09:15 AM/DISC: 06/23/2025 09:14 AM
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Crypto Investment Firm Dao5 Raises $222M Fund to Back Institutional Blockchain Adoption
Crypto investment firm dao5 raised a $222 million fund to invest in blockchain projects targeting institutional and government adoption. The fund brings the firm's total assets under management to $550 million. Founded in 2022 by Tekin Salimi, a former partner at Polychain Capital, dao5 made early bets on projects including Story Protocol, Bittensor, Berachain and EigenLayer. The firm's first fund, launched during the final days of the last bull market three years ago, was fully deployed and has already returned 'the vast majority of commitments to its limited partners,' according to a press release shared with CoinDesk. 'Crypto is entering its adolescence phase. The industry's dependency on pure speculation as the driver of growth is no longer as effective as it once was,' Salimi said. Future success will be a product of 'the real integration of blockchain technology into global financial, governmental, and private sector systems,' he said. The new fund's focus is on-chain public infrastructure, novel stablecoin systems and 'state-sovereign artificial intelligence.' In tandem with the fundraise, the firm plans for its dao5 fund to convert into a decentralized autonomous organization later this year. To support its expansion, the firm added George Lambeth, who previously backed projects like Avalanche and Celestia, as General Partner. Sign in to access your portfolio
