Bengaluru, 23 December 2021: Arcade, which is formerly known as Pawn.fi, is indeed an interface that enables users to borrow against their own NFTs as collateral, has raised $15 million in Series A funding.
What is Series A Funding?
Series A funding is among the stages in some kind of a startup’s capital-raising procedure. The series A round is primarily the second phase of startup funding and the very first phase of venture capital funding.
Series A funding, like seed funding, is indeed a form of equity-based funding. This implies that a firm raises the necessary money from investors by attempting to sell its shares. Even so, most series A funding includes anti-dilution regulations. Startups typically issue preferred shares, which do not give their holders the right to vote.
Pantera, Castle Island Ventures, Franklin Templeton Blockchain Fund, Golden Tree Asset Management, Eniac Ventures, Protofund, Probably Nothing Capital, as well as Lemniscap, along with angel investors BlockFi CEO Zac Prince as well as Quantstamp CEO Richard Ma, announced the investment in an attempt to connect NFT lending platform with the decentralised finance space on Wednesday.
The NFT lending platform is also trying to come with a private release, wit a total loan volume of $3.3 million obtained on a total of $10 million in assets.
According to co-founder Robert Masiello, the fundraise was indeed an equity funding round that will help Arcade widen its team, release the platform clearly and openly, as well as reach more users. Arcade currently has 13 employees and is looking to fill positions in product, business development, marketing, as well as engineering.
Arcade Platform
Arcade is presently in private beta and will also be available to the general public in early Q1 of the next year, according to Masiello. Arcade claims in a private release that this has made possible the biggest loan of $800,000 and that its total loan volume to date is $3.3 million.
As per now, the platform accepts Ethereum-based NFTs as collateral for the loan in any ERC-20 token, including wrapped ether (wETH) as well as stable coins USDC and DAI. Those certain blockchains as well as Layer 2 networks, according to Masiello, are being investigated for assistance in 2022.
Arcade’s primary audience consists of institutional lenders as well as high-net-worth individual investors. According to Masiello, the platform makes money “a small percentage” of each and every transaction completed on it.
NFTfi as well as Pawnfi are two such platforms which facilitate loans secured by NFTs. According to Masiello, Arcade’s challenging benefit is that it provides multiple NFTs to be included on the bundle to obtain a single loan via a wrapped asset known as wNFT. He added just because there is a single loan transaction rather than multiple ones, this tends to help with lower gas fees.
According to Arcade co-founder Gabe Frank, NFTs make up a significant portion of the ever-expanding DeFi market, which really is worth approximately more than $250 billion in total value. “However, despite huge market caps, the inadequate infrastructure in DeFi inhibits NFT owners from attaining liquidity on their holdings,” he stated.
Arcade’s overall funding to date is $17.75 million, big kudos to the Series A round. According to Masiello, the business raised $2.75 million in May, even though it was an equity round.
Arcade presently does not really have a native token, and Masiello stated that it is considering launching one.
