A startup that wants to make DeFi less stressful for institutions raises $4.1 million

A group of three former Coinbase product and engineering veterans has successfully raised $4.1 million to build out a new platform to make the emerging DeFi capital markets more accessible to Wall Street.

The new startup, called Definitive, seeks to automate many aspects of the decentralized finance world, which covers a broad spectrum of financial services. While newcomers may find the transparency of a decentralized perpetual exchange or the attractive yields of so-called vaults appealing, co-founder Jai Prasad noted that the current manual processes for navigating these emerging products can be quite cumbersome for funds, even those that are actively on the market. blood clotting of crypto.

For example, investors have the option to deposit funds into a SOL-secured pit vault on the Solana application Psyfi.io, which earns 9.15% APY, or borrow ETH through Aave at an interest rate of 3.19%. These conditions are particularly favorable compared to traditional financing; however, there is a trade-off in terms of user-friendliness. This is the gap that Definitive aims to bridge with its execution platform for DeFi. The platform integrates seamlessly with various protocols, allowing experienced users to trade, access return opportunities and monitor the risk level of their investments through what they describe as an easy-to-use, automated click-through interface.

DeFi without the headaches

“Investors are seeing that they can make 15% on these different vaults,” Prasad said. “Nowadays, however, they go to any DeFi application, but it is very manual to use them.”

“They want one click, but to do that you have to understand the smart contracts, claim rewards, track the position in real time. And what happens if the protocols are wrong,” he added. “You have a loan with Aave and you’ve borrowed against it. You have to manually check the status of the loan and what if your DeFi guy is on vacation and misses the loans going into these risky positions.”

Definitive is part of the latest generation of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs that have emerged in recent years. They aim to offer investors the same services that are widely available on centralized exchanges and within the traditional financial sector. In a similar vein, former FTX president Brett Harrison has secured funding for his startup Architect, which develops software trading tools for the DeFi sector. In addition, Fordefi has raised $18 million to introduce a DeFi wallet tailored for institutional use.

As for Definitive, it counts Nascent, Coinbase Ventures and CMT Digital among its cap table members after the increase. Prasad, who previously worked at Coinbase and Factset, is building the company together with fellow Coinbase alumni Dennis Qian and Blake Arnold.

“Few in the space can rival the experience and expertise of the Definitive team when it comes to DeFi and institutional crypto markets,” said Thomas Klocanas of BlockTower. “We are extremely excited to support them in their journey to professionalize and standardize access to DeFi in a way that truly enables broader institutional participation in these markets, solving critical elements of protocol integration/access, and at the risk management and implementation layers.”