In its funding round, Set Labs, an upstart platform dedicated to creating structured decentralized finance (DeFi) investment products on the Ethereum blockchain, managed to haul $14 million.
According to CoinDesk, Chief Executive Officer Felix Feng said crypto venture capital company Hashed and budding token fund 1kx led the fundraising, with the funds helping the platform to fully decentralize its protocol.
Moreover, Feng shared the funds will also be used in increasing the number of its multi-coin investment vehicles, to be considered as crypto-native exchange-traded funds (ETFs), from four to as many as 20.
A critical point
The Set Labs CEO said for a start-up that has “seen its protocol’s tokenized portfolios which are kind of like ETFs balloon to $400 million in value,” attaining full decentralization of protocol is a very critical point.
He pointed out that for projects like them, the more customers they have, the more decentralized they need to be, regarding the concept as a rule of thumb in the experimental world of DeFi. Currently, Feng estimates Set Labs has around 20,000 users.
Meanwhile, experts say that the goal of the start-up implies a key tension in DeFi where projects seek to copy traditional financial services such as borrowing, lending, and trading but want to do those without all the downsides and baggage that come with “centralized control and beyond reach of traditional oversight.”
What’s next for Set Labs?
In order to attain their goals, the project has focused on its portfolio development. Part of this is enabling users to be exposed to numerous coins by purchasing a single token.
Such can be done with the UNI-heavy DeFi Pulse Index and Metaverse Index that features tokens from virtual worlds and their respective pairs of leveraged products.
Feng said everything with them is non-custodial and investors’ cash is pooled into a single contract. Users can make trades, yield farm, and stake within the strategy using the token they own.
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