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Coinbase’s new venture capital fund has announced a strategic investment in Compound, a startup that is building money market accounts for cryptocurrency investors.
Compound is the first project to receive venture funding from Coinbase as part of the company’s new efforts for fostering blockchain innovation. As CCN reported, Coinbase announced the new venture fund to incubate early-stage startups in the exploding industry.
Coinbase’s funding is part of a larger $8.2 million seed funding round, which pools other backers including Bain Capital Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital, with participation from Transmedia Capital, Compound Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Danhua Capital.
While other coin and token projects have debated ways to generate interest or dividend income, Compound has run with the idea. In a blog update, Salil Deshpande, Managing Director at Bain Capital Ventures, he states that current lending solutions for cryptoassets “are not good enough: they are either centralized and have substantial counterpart risk, or require robust order books for each type of cryptoasset, which generally do not exist.”
Compound’s mission is to put cryptoassets to work that now “sit idle on exchanges and in wallets, yielding no interest,” according Founder Robert Leshner in a blog update about the funding announcement.
Leshner continues:
“…when Compound launches it’s [sic] first money markets on the Ethereum blockchain, individuals, institutions and applications will earn interest on Ether, stablecoins and utility tokens, with complete liquidity — similar to the overnight rate for dollars and government currencies.”
The core technology behind Compound is a decentralized blockchain infrastructure that is centered around a series of open-source smart contracts. As part of the smart contracts, the interest rates for each asset adjust dynamically in response to the borrowing demand for that asset. An algorithm makes these adjustments in real time, according to the project’s whitepaper.
Compound hopes to attract borrowers such as hedge funds, sophisticated speculators, and other Ethereum applications.
As Compound’s technology aligns closely with Coinbase’s entrenched status as a company that is revolutionizing traditional finance, it is no small wonder why it has received the firm’s backing. The company’s target market of institutional investors is in line with Coinbase’s recent rolling out of a suite of tools for only these clients, as CCN reported on May 15.
Compound’s core technology also eases reporting, since each money market is transparent, auditable, and completely predictable. Coinbase itself has also worked hard on institutional-grade reporting as part of efforts for becoming an SEC-regulated brokerage.
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