Folks Finance, the leading capital markets protocol for borrowing and lending built on the top of Algorand blockchain, announces the closing of its $3M Seed Funding Round, led by Borderless Capital with participation from Jump Crypto, ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, OKX Blockdream Ventures, Genesis Capital, the Algorand Foundation and many others.
Folks Finance is the result of extensive research and engineering conducted by Blockchain Italia, a blockchain software house strongly focused on Algorand. The company dedicated its best minds to the project, designing a disruptive economic lending model and introducing unique features such as staking of rewards, safety margins for cryptocurrency pairs, and an innovative liquidity provision system.
The Investor Group
Round leader, Borderless Capital is the largest Algorand ecosystem investor and is committed to provide a higher multiple of the invested capital into the Folks.Finance lending pools.
David Garcia, who is CEO and Managing Partner at Borderless Capital as well as an angel investor personally supporting Folks Finance, said:
“We are proud to join Folks Finance as the lead investor in this round. Folks.Finance is a key pillar of the Algorand DeFi ecosystem. The team has done an amazing job developing their protocol and building a network of highly strategic partners, setting them up to hit the ground running at launch. The debut of Folks Finance will enable unprecedented amounts of composability among Algorand DeFi dApps and decentralized communities, empowering projects to actively participate in more inclusive and fair capital markets on-chain “
Alongside Borderless, two mainstay crypto investing firms supporting the Folks Seed Round include Jump Crypto and ParaFi Capital.
Anjan Vinod, VP at ParaFi Capital, an alternative investment firm focused on blockchain and decentralized finance markets, also commented:
“As large DeFi users, we see money markets as critical infrastructure for any DeFi ecosystem. We believe Folks Finance is well-positioned to unlock liquidity for a variety of Algorand native assets and become a composable building block. From our first conversation with the Folks Finance team, we noticed how talented Benedetto and team were in designing and building DeFi applications. We are excited to support Folks’ vision in building a scalable money market.”
Folks Finance’s list of seed investors also includes leading venture capital firms such as Coinbase Ventures, OKX Blockdream Ventures, Genesis Capital, Youbi Capital, Algorand Foundation, Meld Ventures, Eterna Capital, 0x Ventures, Polymorphic Capital, Valhalla Capital, ZBS Capital, and Gains Associates. Crypto veteran angel investors supporting Folks Finance include David Garcia, CEO of Borderless Capital, and Calvin Liu, former Strategy Lead at Compound.
Several of the leading DeFi and Financial protocols of the Algorand Ecosystem also joined the seed round including Algomint, Tinyman, StakerDAO, MyAlgo, Venue One, xBacked, Prismatic, among others.
Next Steps
Folks Finance is currently in its smart contract security verification phase, after successfully completing a protocol design review, and early this year is planning the official launch for Folks Finance on the Algorand TestNet, along with the release of Folksy Guys, the official NFT collection dedicated to the Folks Finance community. The team will officially publish the research paper for the protocol economic model soon, and it is already working to establish the milestones of version 2.0. Intending to outline community-centric governance, the ASA-token FOLKS will offer its holders participation in protocol decision-making power, an incentive and staking strategy, and much more.
Of the seed round fundraising, Folks Finance CEO Benedetto Biondi commented: “We are delighted and excited about the outstanding portfolio that we have been onboarding on this investment round. The team’s excellent work has resulted in an innovative design that will make Folks Finance a mainstay in capital markets protocols. We are proud to be supported by the Algorand ecosystem, making us feel part of a strong developing and expanding family. 2022 will be the year of Algorand, and the imminent protocol launch will achieve an important milestone. We are enthusiastic about showing the outputs of a year of hard work behind the scenes.”