OpenTrade has raised an oversubscribed funding round led by Sino Global Capital, with participation from other leading Web3 organizations including Circle Ventures, Kronos Research, Kyber Ventures, Polygon Ventures, and Outlier Ventures.
OpenTrade’s platform will provide users seamless access to a suite of on-chain structured financial products that are backed by investment grade, liquid financial assets. It is secured using time-tested, bankruptcy remote legal structures that ensure investors are fully protected off-chain, while allowing them to continue to operate entirely on-chain.
OpenTrade’s initial products will include liquidity pools for U.S. Treasury Bills, investment grade commercial paper, and investment grade supply chain finance. The supply chain finance products embed USDC payments and financing directly in B2B networks and platforms to make internet-native, on-demand financing available to businesses of all sizes from a global network of non-bank liquidity providers.
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OpenTrade was founded earlier this year by a team of blockchain, engineering, and finance veterans, including Dave Sutter and Jeff Handler, previously of Centre, the consortium founded by Circle and Coinbase to provide standards governance for USDC, Tom Niermann, formerly of Google and Meta, Michael Harte, former COO/CIO at Barclays and Santander and Michele Biscelgia, previously a Partner at AGFE.
OpenTrade’s founding team’s collective experience across Web3, stablecoins, and traditional finance prompted them to work towards building a platform that could serve the evolving needs of Web3 businesses, funds, and investors, who need access to on-chain investments that earn stable, predictable returns, and global supply chains that need access to non-bank financing options.
As part of the company’s formation, OpenTrade’s co-founder Michele Bisceglia and advisor Steve White launched a new dedicated structured finance and investment advisory firm, Five Sigma, that has been spun out of AGFE to manage all of OpenTrade’s ‘off-chain’ operations. Five Sigma has retained a fully staffed team of experienced financial professionals, and currently has over $700M USD in assets under management. Working with Five Sigma allows OpenTrade to function as DeFi’s first truly vertically integrated platform for on-chain investments into tokenized real-world financial assets, which drives lower costs for end-users and allows OpenTrade to dynamically originate, underwrite, and structure products across a wide variety of asset classes.
OpenTrade’s DeFi protocol is built on Circle’s payments infrastructure, runs on Polygon and Ethereum, and is established on widely accepted open-source standards and battle hardened technology infrastructure that has supported trillions of dollars in on-chain transactions. The use of composable and programmable dollars like USDC lowers costs, complexity, and risk across the entire transaction lifecycle for both investors and borrowers.
OpenTrade will leverage the funds from this funding round to scale its operations, and plans to launch in the second half of this year.
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“Thrilled to back the OpenTrade team as they build the necessary infrastructure to bring real-world financial assets onto the blockchain. In the next decade, we expect that a majority of assets will be brought onto public blockchains. OpenTrade is leading this paradigm shift and we look forward to being day one customers.” – Ian Wittkopp, Sino Global Capital, Head of Investment.
“OpenTrade is a team that has identified real use cases where the utility value of USDC and DeFi can drive broader usage of these technologies across global supply chains and finance providers. We are excited to invest in OpenTrade as they help unlock the utility value of USDC in structured and supply chain finance.” – Wyatt Lonergan, Head of Circle Ventures.
“We see that the tokenization of real-world financial assets as a key growth area across DeFi now and moving forward, and believe that the combination of OpenTrade’s experienced team, unique operating mode, and strong product / tech capabilities positions them to become a leader in this promising area.” – Jason Brannigan, General Partner at Kronos Ventures.
“The growing trend of tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs) is opening up new possibilities for generating yield as the lines between decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi) become increasingly blurred. The future of institutional DeFi relies on the development of on-chain structured financial products that can bridge the gap between these two worlds. OpenTrade, with its experienced team and proven track record, is well-positioned to lead the next wave of DeFi innovation, and we are excited to support their mission.” – Loi Luu, Chairman, Kyber Ventures.
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