UK-based DeFi lending protocol organisation Euler raised $8m in Series A funding led by Paradigm.
The round saw participation from a number of high profile crypto and DeFi investors such as Lemniscap, Anthony Sassano, Ryan Sean Adams, Kain Warwick and Hasu.
The company intends to use the funds to grow its development team in anticipation of the protocol’s launch later this year and provide support to help integrate the protocol into the wider DeFi ecosystem.
The fresh round of funding comes after the firm previously raised $800,000 in a seed round last December, exchanging the funds for 10% of the company’s equity. The lead investor in the seed round, Lemniscap, also joined the Series A, along with Ethhub co-founder Anthony Sassano, Mythos Capital founder Ryan Sean Adams, Bankless co-founder David Hoffman, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick and Paradigm researcher Hasu.
Led by Michael Bentley, Jack Prior and Doug Hoyte, Euler provides a capital-efficient permissionless lending protocol that helps users to earn interest on their crypto assets or hedge against volatile markets without the need for a trusted third-party. It features a number of innovations, including permissionless lending markets, reactive interest rates, protected collateral, miner extractable value (MEV)-resistant liquidations, multi-collateral stability pools, sub-accounts, risk-adjusted loans and much more.
The core idea of the project is to provide permissionless borrowing and lending services, similar to Aave and Compound. The key difference is that Euler wants to allow anyone to create their own lending markets, similar to how anyone can create a trading pair on decentralized exchange Uniswap.
It also aims to prevent frontrunning when loans are liquidated. The goal here is to prevent MEV extraction, something that is becoming much more common on the Ethereum blockchain.
Bentley said, “A lot of research and development time has gone into figuring out how to allow users to lend and borrow almost any crypto asset in a capital-efficient way, whilst limiting the risks that some of these more volatile assets sometimes pose. Euler is purpose-built for people and organizations looking for long-term storage and yield opportunities.”
Euler was incubated by Encode Club, a worldwide community of blockchain developers primarily associated with universities. Its native governance token EUL will begin being distributed to lenders and borrowers on the protocol from day 1 of launch.
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