By Riley Kaminer
Who said DeFi was dead? It’s certainly not – in Miami, at least.
Local crypto lending startup Archimedes has just announced its $4.9 million seed round fundraise, led by Hack VC. That is on top of the $2.4 million pre-seed the company raised in March of last year. Investors include Uncorrelated Ventures, Psalion, Truffle Ventures, Cogitent Ventures, Haven VC, and Palsar.
Archimedes is building a lending and borrowing marketplace, which it plans to launch this month. The idea is that, through Archimedes’ platform, users can unlock leverage of up to 10 times the principal collateral amount. On the backend, leverage takers are sent an NFT that represents a yield-generating stablecoin position. Their stablecoin is called lvUSD, and its native token will be ARCH.
“This is not your average jpeg,” the company said in a statement. “Archimedes throws an extra screw into the equation which multiplies a user’s original yield opportunity — leverage.”
The company, which is open source, was founded last year by Boca Raton resident Tomer Mayara, Derek Moen and Oz Rabinovitch. The team refers to themselves as “g(r)eeks,” in a nod to their philosopher namesake.
In exchange for this unusually high leverage, borrowers will pay a flat fee plus give Archimedes a performance fee based on their profits from the leveraged positions. “With these fees paid by the borrowers, Archimedes is then able to close the loop and pay the lenders for lending their money,” the company said.
DeFi has been a major focus in the South Florida crypto and fintech spaces. It was the theme of last year’s Permissionless conference in Palm Beach, which attracted thousands of diamond-handed HODL-ers, whales, and traditional financiers alike. While the FTX scandal – and the cascading company collapses that followed it – has rocked the crypto space, this funding may signal an upswing for companies looking to bring unique offerings to market.
At Permissionless, Chris Dixon, who leads Andreessen Horowitz’s web3 practice, urged investors to take a long-term perspective on the transformational prospects of DeFi. “Maybe we’ve had a bad week or a bad year,” he said in one of the opening addresses to attendees. “But if you zoom out, is this going to be a bad three years? Probably not.” In fact, Dixon called this a “golden period” for crypto.
READ MORE ON REFRESH MIAMI:
- Web3 frens and degens land in West Palm Beach for Permissionless conference
- Riding growth wave, Milo launches crypto loan product
- OneOf’s Lin Dai looks beyond the crypto winter to give us a glimpse of the future of digital assets
- Fixed income fintech YieldX acquired by global wealth management platform FNZ
