Participated · Equity · Mar 2024

Kemet Trading is a derivatives trading platform provider supporting trading of digital-asset options, futures and perpetual contracts. The company aims to serve as a single institutional access point to the digital asset derivatives ecosystem. On March 22, 2024, Kemet Trading announced completion of a $5 million strategic investment. The round was led by Further Ventures and included participation from Deribit, QCP, Falcon X, Flow Traders and Hyperithm. The article describes the financing as a strategic investment but does not disclose valuation, use of proceeds, or operating metrics. Details beyond the investor list and the $5 million amount were not provided in the report.

Participated · Seed · Mar 2024

StablR issues a euro-backed stablecoin called EurR, which it began minting on October 12. The company says more than 10 million EurR tokens were minted in its first month of issuance. StablR is officially registered as a Virtual Financial Asset Issuer in Malta and provides daily on-chain reserve statements via Chainlink. Customer funds are fully segregated in an Irish trust managed by an independent asset manager. That trust invests in a regulated money market fund that holds short-term government bonds to minimize counterparty risk. The startup began operations in August 2022 and says it aims to bring liquidity to both DeFi and CeFi markets and establish a new benchmark for stability and trustworthiness in euro stablecoins.

Participated · Safe · Feb 2024

Ethena is a DeFi protocol built around USDe, a yield-bearing synthetic dollar that combines stablecoin demand with derivatives-based hedging strategies to generate yield. The protocol also issues a governance token, ENA, which recently received a strategic investment from Janus Henderson. Ethena has grown into one of the larger DeFi platforms, managing about $5 billion in assets after reaching roughly $15 billion during last year’s market rally. The company has been deepening ties with traditional finance through partnerships and investments, including deals with Coinbase Ventures and Anchorage Digital. Ethena is being considered by institutional partners for treasury cash allocation and potential distribution of USDe via exchange-traded investment products.

Led · Seed · Mar 2022

Thetanuts Finance builds DeFi structured products and customizable vaults that simplify options strategies for retail and institutional users. Its flagship offerings, Theta-Index (an option basket) and Theta-Wheel (physically settled vaults alternating between calls and puts), let investors monetize volatility and earn premiums. The platform accepts tokens from 11 chains as collateral and provides projects a way to place native tokens into options markets. Launched in August 2021 by a team of programmers, hedge fund managers and financial analysts, Thetanuts aims to level the playing field by making complex structured products accessible to everyday users. The company plans to engage DAOs and GameFi projects to develop yield-generation opportunities and offer treasury-management tools. Thetanuts recently secured an $18M capital infusion to accelerate development of its user-friendly instruments and expand its structured-products platform.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2021

Horizen Labs develops tooling and infrastructure to enable companies and developers to deploy fully programmable blockchains and decentralized applications. Its core offerings include a proprietary SDK, the Horizen public blockchain infrastructure, the Zendoo scalability protocol, and privacy enhancements using zk-SNARK technology. The company has released zkAudit, described in the article as a fully decentralized, privacy-preserving automated audit blockchain. Horizen Labs previously raised $3.75 million in 2019 and has just closed a $7 million seed round to accelerate product and tooling development. The new funds will support building developer tooling, expanding the team, and enabling businesses to deploy private or public blockchains with low fees, high throughput, configurable revenue models, and enhanced privacy. Zendoo’s deployment on mainnet is slated for the end of Q3, per the article.