Former BlockTower investors raise $6.5 million for crypto yield marketplace Superform

Superform Labs, a crypto startup founded by two former BlockTower Capital investors and a former Microsoft product manager, has raised $6.5 million in seed and angel funding rounds.

Polychain Capital led the seed round, which included BlockTower Capital, Maven 11, Circle Ventures and other participating companies, Superform said Wednesday. Angel investors in the round included Arthur Hayes, Marc Bhargava, Avi Felman, Michael Bucella and Bryan Pellegrino.

The seed round closed in November 2022, but Superform waited to announce it alongside the launch of its marketplace in early access mode, Superform co-founder Blake Richardson told The Block. The round was structured as equity with token warrants, he said, but declined to comment on the valuation.

Richardson founded Superform with his former BlockTower colleague Vikram Arun and Alex Cort, a former product manager at Microsoft. At BlockTower, Richardson said he and Arun ran a nine-figure DeFi fund and faced daily challenges managing yield positions on blockchains; that’s why they decided to build Superform.

“Dealing with positions on more than 15 chains at a time was labor-intensive and complicated,” Richardson said. “We left this great role at BlockTower because we needed to build a solution that was accessible to everyone. BlockTower Capital supported us in our transition and became our second largest backer in our seed round,” he added.

Superform, a crypto revenue marketplace

Superform is a permissionless cross-chain yield marketplace that allows DeFi protocols to list their vaults or asset pools. Crypto users, on the other hand, can deposit money into those vaults and earn returns.

“Superform is the first place to list revenue without permission,” says Richardson. “We are the easiest place to discover, deposit and manage returns because we have abstracted swapping and bridging and made all actions available through a single interface.”

After a user deposits money, Superform creates a tokenized representation of the deposit, called a SuperPosition. This SuperPosition allows for “infinitely comprehensible combinations” of yield, according to Richardson. “Imagine a tokenized representation of liquid reinvested ETH on Arbitrum, deposited into a lending vault on Optimism. Any combination of interactions between Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVMs) is now possible,” he added.

Superform is launching today in early access mode for seven EVM-compatible networks – Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Avalanche C-Chain and BNB Chain – with plans to expand to other blockchains in the future.

Superform uses the blockchain infrastructure of LayerZero, Hyperlane, Wormhole, Li.Fi and Socket for its marketplace, Richardson said. Superform’s public launch is scheduled for the first quarter, he added.

Superform Rewards Program

To reward its users, Superform launches a program called SuperFrens. Season 0 of the show will go live for early access users, and the first season will go live next month with the platform’s open access release, Richardson said.

SuperFrens is a “gamified, on-chain” rewards system, Richardson noted, adding that it allows users to compete with each other to reach the highest rank on the monthly leaderboard.

SuperFrens are fixed-supply NFTs, and collecting multiple NFTs of a tier will qualify users for future rewards and exclusive benefits, Richardson said. He declined to comment on whether these benefits include the native token airdrops, but said that SuperPositions will be convertible to ERC-20 tokens and that Superform will continue to decentralize.