The liquid staking service ClayStack raised $5.2m following a seed funding round in the form of a SAFT.
The round was led by CoinFund and ParaFi Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, the Solana Foundation, Animoca Brands. Angel investors included Meltem Demirors of CoinShares, The Block researcher Larry Cermak, Stani Kulechov, head of the DeFi project Aave, and Robert Leshner.
The funds raised will be used to expand the team and further develop the protocol, whose launch is expected in September.
ClayStack operates on a model similar to Lido protocol, focused on Ethereum 2.0 (ETH2). ClayStack’s solution allows users to stake funds without lock-up periods that entail temporary illiquidity. To this end, synthetic tokens are used, said Mohak Agarwal, the project’s CEO, in a comment to The Block.
For example, a user deposits 1000 MATIC tokens. In return, they will receive 1000 csMATIC tokens, and ClayStack will stake the original assets. As rewards for staking, the project will periodically send csMATIC to the user. The latter can be exchanged back to MATIC at any time, without a lock-up period, and can also be used in DeFi apps to earn additional yield.
In the initial phase the platform will support MATIC, ETH2 and The Graph assets (GRT). In the future ClayStack will integrate other coins, including Near (NEAR) and Solana (SOL), turning it into an interoperability protocol.
Earlier researchers at Staked counted $20 billion earned by users as staking rewards in 2020.
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