Kintsu, a liquid staking protocol building on the Monad blockchain, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round.
Castle Island Ventures led the round, with Brevan Howard Digital, CMT Digital, Spartan Group, Breed VC, CMS Holdings, Animoca Ventures and others participating, Kintsu said Thursday. Angel investors, including Alex Matthews and Ross Trachtman from Brevan Howard Digital, Marin Tvrdic from Lido and Robinson Burkey from Wormhole Foundation, also joined the round.
Kintsu began raising funds for the seed round in May and closed it earlier this month, founder Stephen Novenstern told The Block. The round was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) plus token warrants, Novenstern said, declining to comment on the valuation.
Kintsu is a liquid staking protocol founded last year by Novenstern, a former head of strategy at Pangolin, a decentralized exchange on the Avalanche blockchain. "Having run Pangolin, the decentralized exchange that brought Avalanche from zero to one, generating $18 billion+ of volume in its lifetime with over 3200 trading pairs, and run a genesis Ethereum validator node, liquid staking was right at the intersection of my interests," Novenstern said.
Kintsu first built a liquid staking protocol for the Aleph Zero blockchain but is now laser-focused on Monad. "In many ways, proof of stake blockchains like Monad are like digital nation states," Novenstern said. "Staking creates an opportunity cost for DeFi, which can limit growth at the protocol level. The liquid staking token category, not just liquid, but 'composable,' posed a way to fix this and has seen great product market fit across revolutionary blockchains like Ethereum and Solana."
Now, catalyzing Monad's DeFi ecosystem through liquid staking is an "enormous opportunity," according to Novenstern. Monad, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible Layer 1 blockchain, is a highly anticipated blockchain launch. The blockchain's developer, Monad Labs, is backed by heavyweights, including Paradigm, Electric Capital and Coinbase Ventures. In April, Monad Labs raised $225 million in funding, reportedly at a $3 billion valuation. Kintsu recently said it believes Monad will be the next multibillion-dollar general-purpose blockchain with diverse use cases.
Kintsu's sMONAD liquid staking token will launch in the first week of Monad's launch. The Monad mainnet is expected to launch sometime this year and, according to Novenstern, "would change web3 forever with a parallelized 100% bytecode compatible EVM, async execution, and the custom MonadDB state database."
Asked if Kintsu will launch its token, Novenstern said the protocol's Monad-native DAO will decide. "Building on the shoulders of giants like Lido and Jito, Kintsu leverages best practices forged from multi-billion dollar TVL protocols while advancing DAO participation," he added.
Kintsu currently employs about a dozen people, and Novenstern plans to hire more people in the near future.
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