a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator joins $3.2 million seed round for OpenTrade

OpenTrade, an on-chain institutional lending and yield products platform, raised $3.2 million in seed funding. 

The a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX) participated in the round. Other backers include CMCC Global, Draper Dragon, Ryze Labs and Plassa Capital. OpenTrade's total funding to date is now $4.45 million, and the firm intends to use its fresh financing to grow its team across all key functions, the firm's co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Jeff Handler told The Block. 

OpenTrade is built on the payment and DeFi infrastructure from Circle, the stablecoin issuer behind USDC -0.065% and EURC. Through OpenTrade, regulated asset managers can create on-chain lending products that can bear yield, depositing USDC or EURC into on-chain vaults with certain investment criteria and target yields, according to the firm's website. 

"OpenTrade's solutions are truly unique in the market in that we are the only company that has built a truly enterprise-grade B2B2C product that allows CEX's and Neobanks to deploy RWA-backed yield products that they can then offer to all of their existing users, all within their existing platform and apps," Handler said. "This is extremely valuable for companies that are using USDC to power digital dollar accounts for users outside of the U.S."

"These companies want to extend their products with ways for their users to earn stable, predicate yield, but only if it is backed by both assets and operating models that they can trust, and done in a way that doesn't exclude wide groups of users from being able to participate," Handler continued. 

OpenTrade is based in the UK and went out of stealth in February 2023. Three months later, the firm raised $1.5 million in funding led by Sino Global Capital, with additional support from Circle Ventures, Kronos Research, Kyber Ventures, Polygon Ventures and Outlier Ventures. OpenTrade partnered with the crypto exchange WOO X to provide tokenized U.S. Treasury builds in Asian markets in September 2023.