BTC-backed USDB stablecoin developer raises $2,3 million in funding

What’s new? Bima Labs, the company behind the bitcoin-backed USBD stablecoin, has raised $2,25 million in a seed round of funding led by Portal Ventures. Bima Labs was founded in April and opened its fundraising at the same time, closing within three months.

Material by The Block

What else is known? The stablecoin USDB created by the company can be issued by providing collateral in the form of tokens of liquid bitcoin staking and restaking protocols. Bima Labs will accept collateral from several blockchains, including Bitcoin and Layer 2 (L2) networks based on it, Solana, and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible networks.

Bitcoin-based liquid staking tokens (LST) and liquid restaking tokens (LRT) can be obtained from vendors such as Lorenzo, Lombard, pStake, Bedrock, Acre, DLC.link, ALEX Labs BTC.

USBD can be used for lending, borrowing, exchanging, and other purposes in decentralized financial protocols (DeFi), allowing users to earn additional rewards.

USBD is currently running on a testnet. According to Bima founder and CEO Siddarth Sridhar, the asset is scheduled to launch on the mainnet in the fourth quarter of this year. Around the same time, the company will launch its own BIMA governance token on one of the EVM-compatible networks. The team has yet to finalize the specific network.

Draper Goren Blockchain, Sats Ventures, Luxor Technology, CoreDAO, and Halo Capital participated in the seed round. Angel investors, including Ryan Fang of Ankr, Brian Crain of Chorus One, Jeffrey Feng of Sei Labs, and the co-founder of Berachain, known by the pseudonym Smokey, also joined the round. The valuation of Bima itself at the end of the round was not disclosed. Investors received token warrants along with equity stakes.

The funding will allow Bima to expand its staff, which currently stands at six people, by hiring across all areas, including business development and engineering.

Sridhar shared in a comment to The Block that Bima initially developed a stablecoin in the Ethereum ecosystem based on the EigenLayer restaking protocol, but later decided to switch to Bitcoin. According to him, anything that is realized in Ethereum in 4-5 years can be achieved in Bitcoin in 4-5 months.

He explained that the Bitcoin ecosystem has a broader market reach and greater usage in Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa, and as a result, greater potential for higher returns.

Bima joins more than a dozen projects in the bitcoin ecosystem that have raised venture capital funding this year.

Earlier, analyst Colin Wu talked about ten projects with investments from the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, which may release their tokens in the second half of the year. Among them were as many as five projects in the bitcoin ecosystem: Babylon, Solv, Zest, StakeStone, and Lorenzo.