This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
DeFi infrastructure firm Yield.xyz has exited stealth with a $5 million strategic round from Multicoin Capital, Lightspeed has learned exclusively.
Yield.xyz aggregates staking and DeFi yields into one set of APIs. This lets wallets, crypto apps and neobanks offer DeFi functionality without having to manually integrate a laundry list of yield venues. Down the line, the platform aims to offer a more automated yield strategy, where the DeFi yield rate can be abstracted away and built around users’ risk appetites.
Yield.xyz, which was formerly known as Omni, got its start in the 2021 crypto cycle as a multichain wallet app. Earlier this year, the company was acquired by Echo Base, the company behind the peer-to-peer crypto marketplace Paxful.
With the rebrand and fresh funding from Multicoin, Yield is now honing in on general yield integrations.
Crypto allows developers to spin up new pools of capital basically instantly. This can be dopamine-inducing for users, but a pain point for user-facing apps. Yield noticed that some of its clients would have 20 or more employees cobbling together DeFi APIs and creating “backend Frankensteins,” co-founder Serafin Lion Engel told me. When employees would leave the wallet or app companies, it would be costly to figure out how to maintain the codebases, he added.
With Yield.xyz, apps can just integrate one API and get access to hundreds of staking and DeFi integrations, Lion Engel said. It’s the largest yield supplier by number of integrations for the crypto wallet Ledger.
Yield.xyz’s infrastructure offers access to over 200 yield sources on Solana, according to a tracking sheet viewed by Blockworks. This number will likely grow further with the firm’s support from Solana-aligned Multicoin, which gives Yield a “front row seat to everything that’s going on in Solana,” Lion Engel said.
Down the line, Yield wants to onboard more traditional fintech-y firms like neobanks. It also wants to create an automated yield strategy where deposits can automatically rebalance and possibly create something like a unified DeFi yield rate. The demand for these developments could be driven by the explosive growth in demand for stablecoins.
“Now it’s very easy for you to onramp and get access to stablecoins. The next thing is really going to be being able to get yield on them,” Lion Engel said.
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
