30.8.2024
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Sovryn announced today that it has secured $5.4m in its latest funding round, led by General Catalyst, to expand its global financial operating system designed to provide individual self-sovereignty and financial autonomy to people around the world. The additional investors in the round were Collider Ventures, Bering Waters, Bollinger Investment Group, and Balaji Srinivasan.
The raise comes ahead of the public launch of Sovryn’s Zero protocol. Zero is a highly innovative lending product that will allow users to take out 0% interest loans using their bitcoin as collateral, with no repayment or maturity date against the loan. The loans are interest free in perpetuity and users decide when to pay them back, if ever. The waitlist for early access to Zero is now open.
The investment round highlights the rapidly growing appetite from traditional investors to get involved in the DeFi and Bitcoin space. Despite the recent dramatic downturn in markets, the funding demonstrates the confidence these investors have in Sovryn’s ability to grow the capabilities of Bitcoin beyond simply a store of value, and to create tools for financial sovereignty.
General Catalyst managing director Kyle Doherty said, “We believe the team at Sovryn has the technical ability and community to build products that will actually fulfil the promise of DeFi by bringing it to the dominant network, Bitcoin. We are philosophically aligned with the goals of the Bitcoin and Sovryn networks to empower people, promote individual freedom, and achieve broader financial inclusion”.
The investment round is game-changing for both traditional VC and the cryptocurrency market, as it not only bridges the gap between the tech financing world and the highly innovative arena of decentralized finance but was also approved via a community governance vote on the Sovryn platform. The Sovryn Improvement Proposal (SIP) for this funding round gave community members invested in the protocol an opportunity to vote on whether to proceed. This decentralized referendum-style governance is referred to as Bitocracy in the Sovryn ecosystem and ensures no single entity can make major decisions or changes to the system.
The funding round also represents a reversal of the typical order of opportunity for investment. In both traditional start-ups and the crypto industry, VCs are the first investors through the gate and the general public can only gain access later. Here the VC investors are participating in an already lively market with an established community of investors.
Sovryn core contributor, Edan Yago, says "Sovryn is a user-owned cooperative developing open-source code to enhance the freedom of individuals around the world. There is no corporation, foundation or non-profit behind Sovryn - so it's remarkable that established funds, like GC, are changing the way they invest in order to support the Sovryn mission”.
Sovryn is a leading Bitcoin-native DeFi platform and is fully community-owned and governed. It’s built on Bitcoin, uses BTC as its primary trading currency, and delivers decentralized and autonomous finance at scale. With a security-first approach, Sovryn bridges the gap between Bitcoin and the rest of the smart-contract world for projects and individuals who want access to financial applications without being beholden to governments or financial intermediaries. The platform delivers a wide variety of financial services such as spot and margin trading, borrowing and lending, and liquidity providing across investment pools—all built on the foundation of bitcoin as the reserve currency of the future.
Sovryn is still very much in its infancy, steadily building with quiet confidence. Yet, since officially launching just a little over a year ago, it has experienced extremely rapid growth:
“Our intention is to help grow the Sovryn ecosystem, actively participate in Bitocracy, and become useful members of the Sovryn community. We think we have much to offer and are excited to get started,” said Doherty. “There is an incredible opportunity to pursue investments that enable and build upon Bitcoin and Satoshi’s original vision. Bitcoin is the longest running cryptocurrency with the largest market cap, and with the appetite for DeFi on other blockchains, Sovryn is fulfilling that appetite on Bitcoin to provide people with financial control over their lives.”
Prior investors in Sovryn include Anthony Pompliano, who led a syndicate of investors in an investment round in March 2021. Those investors include: AscendEX, Gate.io, DeFi Technologies, Cadenza (a BitMEX affiliated venture fund), Collider Ventures, Blockware Solutions, Monday Capital and Greenfield One.
General Catalyst is a venture capital firm that invests in powerful, positive change that endures — for our entrepreneurs, our investors, our people, and society. We support founders with a long-term view who challenge the status quo, partnering with them from seed to growth stage and beyond to build companies that withstand the test of time. With offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York City, London, and Boston, the firm has helped support the growth of businesses such as: Airbnb, Deliveroo, Guild, Gusto, Hubspot, Illumio, Lemonade, Livongo, Oscar, Samsara, Snap, Stripe, and Warby Parker. For more: www.generalcatalyst.com.
Sovryn is a Bitcoin-native, decentralized trading and lending platform that empowers users to trade bitcoin in a permissionless, non-custodial, and censorship-resistant way by ensuring that users hold the keys to their bitcoin and have autonomous control over them.
The project officially launched in April 2021 and now has 70+ core contributors worldwide. Its ambition is to help create a world where regulations set by jurisdictions on the basis of geography, are a thing of the past - building a toolkit to empower individuals to be self-sovereign, no matter their location.
Source: Yahoo Finance
