Ondo Finance, which describes itself as a “permissionless, decentralized investment bank,” has raised $20 million in Series A funding to hire more staff and continue building DeFi offerings for DAOs and retail investors.
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Pantera Capital led the round, with Coinbase Ventures, GoldenTree, Wintermute, Tiger Global, and others participating.
Currently, Ondo offers structured, token-based investment vehicles and provides liquidity to DAOs. Over $210 million has been deposited through Ondo, which is based on Ethereum and offers liquidity-as-a-service for DAOs, also known as decentralized autonomous organizations.
DAOs use blockchain tokens to enable collective governance over a protocol or project. Ondo’s liquidity allows DAO token holders to trade tokens more easily.
Ondo already has provided liquidity to DAOs like Terra, Frax, and Frei. But Ondo itself also aims to be more fully decentralized, and plans to launch its own DAO and the corresponding ONDO token.
Similar to BitDAO, in which Thiel also has invested, Ondo plans to offer community-based voting where contributors are rewarded for their contributions to the platform. Ondo DAO members also will be able to modify the parameters of the platform’s smart contracts.
In a statement, Ondo Finance CEO Nathan Allman hinted that new products are coming that will allow more investors to “obtain broad exposure to DeFi yields at a customized risk level.” Among those new products will be vaults centered around algorithmic stablecoin yield bundles and multi-blockchain yield vaults.
Ondo is currently compatible with Uniswap and Sushiswap, and, according to the company’s statement, is planning to enable compatibility with Curve and Convex.
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