OpenTrade raises $17 million to expand onchain yield infrastructure as stablecoin lending market accelerates

[kevin1]

OpenTrade, an institutional-grade platform for onchain and real-world asset backed lending and stablecoin yield products, has raised $17 million in a strategic funding round led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital, bringing its total funding to $30 million. The round also included backing from a16z Crypto, adding one of the most prominent crypto-focused venture firms to a cap table that already includes Circle Ventures and Polygon Ventures from the company's 2023 seed financing. OpenTrade surpassed $200 million in total value locked in April, and CEO David Sutter said the new capital will support the continued expansion of the company's permissioned and permissionless yield infrastructure, growth of its vault-focused service Curation+, expansion of its asset management and trading team, increased engineering capacity, and a dedicated customer success function for its growing institutional client base.OpenTrade's infrastructure routes user deposits into tokenized vaults that allocate capital across a mix of yield sources, primarily real-world assets such as fixed-income instruments alongside selected DeFi strategies. Each vault follows a defined allocation strategy and operates through smart contract mechanisms that manage deposits, track positions, and distribute returns.

The legal architecture has been purpose-built to offer products to clients globally while maintaining compliance with both traditional finance and digital asset regulatory standards, a design priority that CEO Sutter described as analogous to securities lending in traditional finance but adapted to the lending of stablecoins instead of securities. The company was founded in 2023 by David Sutter and Jeff Handler, who previously worked at Centre, the now-dissolved consortium of Circle and Coinbase that provided governance standards for the USDC stablecoin, giving the founding team direct institutional experience with the infrastructure they are now building yield products on top of.

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USDC founders left Circle and built yield infrastructure on top of it, the pipeline from knowledge to product is very short

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a16z Crypto backing a compliant institutional yield product, the portfolio has come a long way from 2021