November 11, 2022 – APWine, a DeFi protocol that creates yield derivatives and opens the market for future yield, announces the successful raise of its $2.6 million seed extension, led by Greenfield One.
APWine was founded in August 2020 and had previously raised $1 million in seed funding with a round led by Delphi Ventures that was also backed by The Spartan Group, DeFi Alliance, Rarestone Capital, and many prominent builders and angels in the DeFi space including Julien Bouteloup and Marc Zeller from Aave.
“We are very excited to be moving forward with a new round of investors that will help us bootstrap the technical components and products that we have been building for a year now, and that will bring APWine to the next stage” says Gaspard Peduzzi, CEO and Co-Founder of APWine.
Built as a derivatives layer that can integrate with any DeFi protocols & yield generating assets in a permissionless way, APWine protocol is creating the interest market by bringing new primitives to the DeFi space.
It aims to create an infrastructure that allows stakeholders of DeFi protocols to trade their interest rates, increasing usability of those technologies with novel strategies and instruments. Liquidity providers, protocols and traders can now speculate on the variability of their interest rates, as well as leverage those derivatives to hedge or optimize their methods.
On the structural layer side, this means: pools can be created for any yield bearing asset, enabling anyone to create yield derivatives based on underlying tokens. The protocol generates custom vaults associated with those pools to efficiently manage and incentivise the deployment of liquidity for those instruments. Liquidity providers for these vaults generate additional yield on top of their current strategies as they collect trading fees.
With over $56 billon in value deposited over various protocols, DeFi has shown strength over the past year in difficult market conditions, proving its efficiency and necessity in many aspects. Interest rate primitives and strategies have been maturing through the deployment of standards and more advanced instruments. With TradFi moving more and more into decentralized finance, the demand for risk management strategies built around yield and various derivatives will increase.
“We are passionate about APWine as it created a composable low-level yield tokenization primitive for DeFi. Building it as a primitive and not as a single narrow use-case provides builders with flexibility to build various yield-focused applications, including those which are not possible in TradFi, a goal which we are fully behind”, says Gleb Dudka, Principal at Greenfield. “Given the size and how closely tied the notion of yield is to DeFi, we are looking forward to seeing future use-cases and integrations with APWine. Assuming even minor spill-over effects of traditional finance into DeFi, one can expect the market for such yield derivative products to reach hundreds of billions in value (0.01% of the global yield derivative market).”
“It’s nice to see complex concepts from Traditional Finance being implemented into DeFi. Derivatives such as futures are tough concepts but APWine managed to make it super simple.” said Julien Bouteloup, Founder at Stake Capital. “It has probably one of the best potential out there. The Future of France is real.”
APWine is led by Gaspard Peduzzi, Ulysse Ramage and Jean Chambras who all met during their computer engineering studies. They’ve built a strong team of passionate builders, supported by the advisory of Julien Bouteloup from Stake DAO and Marc Zeller from Aave.
Since its founding, APWine has partnered up with Stake DAO, Aave, Lido and some of the best DeFi protocols in the space to provide fixed-rates and yield derivatives on a rich selection of assets.
“We are reaching a state of maturity in the market that enables complex protocols like APWine to thrive,” says Ulysse Ramage, Co-founder at APWine. “Yield farming is a traditional finance practice that has been rendered mainstream through DeFi. We believe the set of derivative tools that we are building for the yield market vastly increases the quality and diversity of strategies in DeFi, and we are working hard to make these new composable primitives appealing to retail consumers and institutions alike.”
APWine will use the funding to further expand its team and develop its selection of yield derivative products.
About Greenfield
Greenfield Capital is a European crypto investment firm, backing developer teams building toward an open, decentralized, and more robust architecture of tomorrow’s web.
Founded by Sebastian Blum and Jascha Samadi in 2018, Greenfield provides funding and competent support in operations (e.g. running validators for networks and protocols in-house), tokenomics and governance. Having delivered superior capital returns with their I. and II. crypto fund, Greenfield initiated 2021 its III. crypto fund, the largest fund dedicated to crypto in Europe to date (€135m).
Greenfield’s portfolio includes Nym, NEAR, Celo, Dapper Labs, Safe, Liquity, Arweave, 1inch and The Fabricant among others.