DeFi, a peer-to-peer monetary system that makes use of blockchain expertise, is among the many quickest rising sectors of the crypto business. It consists of prediction markets like Polymarket, NFTs like Trump’s digital buying and selling playing cards, and stablecoins, a sort of crypto designed to fluctuate consistent with a fiat foreign money just like the U.S. greenback.
August, a crypto-focused prime brokerage agency, is in search of to make it simpler for traders to entry all kinds of DeFi, brief for decentralized finance, by one platform. The corporate has raised $10 million in a Sequence A led by Dragonfly Ventures. Different traders within the spherical embody SCB Restricted, sixth Man Ventures, and Foresight Ventures. August’s valuation within the funding spherical was not disclosed.
August works with giant monetary establishments, comparable to hedge funds and household places of work which might be in search of yields and returns on their crypto investments, by lending, borrowing, and buying and selling. Aya Kantorovich, co-CEO of August, informed Fortune that the corporate’s purpose is to be the primary place institutional traders go.
Whereas August works with 70 DeFi protocols—units of guidelines and sensible contracts that assist merchants conduct transactions with no centralized entity like a financial institution—and 13 blockchains, Kantorovich desires to remove the confusion that comes with deciding which one to make use of. “When you concentrate on establishments, you need to do away with this concept of or summary away each chains and protocols. You simply need to have one place,” she stated.
August seeks to attach purchasers with DeFi networks that lend crypto and provide by-product and token buying and selling, together with Aave, Morpho, and Uniswap. It additionally goals to assist purchasers monitor all of their positions from a single dashboard.
That makes Kantorovich’s firm a intermediary of kinds. Nevertheless, she says that as a result of August has entry to purchasers’ positions the corporate can let purchasers pay for his or her loans, by-product positions, and trades suddenly as a substitute of placing cash down for every particular person place.
August produces most of its income by buying and selling spreads—cash made off the distinction between the worth a token is purchased at and the worth it’s offered at—and in addition fees its purchasers buying and selling charges on every transaction. Kantorovich declined to reveal the corporate’s annual income.
August isn’t the one crypto-focused prime brokerage. Coinbase has a division that caters particularly to giant institutional purchasers generally known as Coinbase Prime. FalconX is one other well-known brokerage within the area.
August will use the cash from its newest fundraising to construct out its advertising technique, rent extra staff, and proceed growing new expertise. The corporate beforehand raised $6 million in a seed spherical in 2023.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com