Bering Waters OTC has partnered with DeFi smart insurance aggregator Armor to provide specialized OTC services for institutional investors.
Breaking through all expectations, the DeFi market realized 2,000% growth throughout 2020, topping $13B in locked assets in December. In the first months of this year, this number has already doubled and many experts predict that, in the next months, we will see significant migration of managed assets from traditional platforms to decentralized ones. The upheavals seen in the first month of this year with regard to Wall Street versus retail investors is an early indication of the changes to be expected in 2021.
“In the past year, DeFi has established itself as part of the future of financial technology; it is not just useful, it is inevitable,” says Calvin Liu, co-founder of Divergence Ventures and Strategy Lead for Compound. “While still early, the floodgates are open for institutional investors to enter the space and we expect them to do so en masse in 2021.“
We are on the verge of an unprecedented financial revolution made possible through the key principles of DeFi, which are composability – the ability to build money legos together to make a customized transaction every time – and permissionless access. As financial first responders, insurers provide a fundamental component of risk management for traditional investors, without which the investment managers would have to adopt a lower risk tolerance and accept more conservative returns. In DeFi, the protocols are largely open-source, and this makes them more vulnerable to potential hacks. To compound the problem, the insurance historically available to investors has lacked the flexibility to cover ever-changing DeFi investment portfolios. As a result, institutions have been slower to enter the DeFi space than they would like.
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Armor provides a solution for professional investors with the first-ever dynamic cover brokerage protocol for DeFi. Armor’s insurance empowers its users to permissionlessly leverage a “Pay as You Go” coverage system for their funds. Within two days of launch, Armor had already sold $185M in coverage with $1.2M in premiums paid by clients, and the company has passed $500M in coverage to date. The goal is to provide a system that can keep up with the rapid pace of the modern DeFi investor, where users are billed by the second without any upfront cost or fixed duration requirements. In the same way Chainlink has become systemically important to the adoption of DeFi by developers, Armor will pave the way for professional investors in DeFi.
All the interest in Armor’s solution has created its own challenge. With perfect timing, Armor has attracted well-known strategic investors including Collider Ventures, Divergence Ventures and Alameda Research, as well as Bering Waters Ventures. Their insights and contribution have proven essential to Armor’s mission, and the company sees an opportunity to continue gathering strategically aligned investors. To meet the needs of institutional investors as well as inviting additional strategic partners to support the project, Armor has appointed Bering Waters OTC as the official OTC desk to handle secondary market opportunities as they arise.
With years of experience in trading high-volume institutional interest in unreleased tokens, locked tokens, and liquid tokens listed on low-liquidity markets, Bering Waters OTC is uniquely positioned to seamlessly manage investors’ interest in acquiring blocks of Armor tokens through secondaries. With a track record of supporting projects from startup through growth to scale, Bering Waters has earned a trusted reputation with investors through building relationships and achieving successful outcomes.
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