Stablecoin protocol Level raised a fresh round of venture capital to expand its $80 million yield-paying stablecoin as yield-generating digital asset offerings are increasingly in demand with a cooldown in crypto prices.
Peregrine Exploration, the development firm behind Level, received another $2.6 million led by early backer Dragonfly Capital with Polychain also participating, founders David Lee and Kedian Sun told CoinDesk in an interview. New investors include Flowdesk, Echo syndicates Native Crypto and Feisty Collective by Path, and angel investors Sam Kazemian of Frax and Albert Chon of Injective.
The latest round followed a $3.4 million raise in August, bringing total venture capital funding to $6 million to date.
Level, with its lvlUSD token, is competing in the fast-growing stablecoin asset class, one of the hottest sectors in crypto and a darling among venture capital investments. Stablecoins—cryptocurrencies with a fixed price, predominantly tied to the U.S. dollar—are a key piece of infrastructure for trading and transactions on blockchains. However, the largest issuers do not generally offer yield to users earned on assets in the backing reserve. Tether, for example, reported $13 billion profits last year, in part from the U.S. Treasury yield backing its $143 billion USDT token.
That’s why a new generation of yield-earning stablecoins is getting increasingly popular among crypto investors. Ethena’s USDe, which generates yield on a market-neutral carry trade strategy harvesting futures funding rates, zoomed to above $5 billion supply in little more than a year. Meanwhile, tokenized versions of money market funds and Treasury bills, another stablecoin alternative, hit a $4.6 billion market capitalization.
Level’s stablecoin offers investors yield from putting the backing assets to work on decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocols like Aave, while automating its reserve management. Users can mint lvlUSD by depositing Circle’s USDC or USDT stablecoins and lock up (stake) the tokens to lend out to generate yield on-chain. As of last week, annualized yield for staked version of lvlUSD stood at 8.3%, higher than tokenized money market fund yields. Meanwhile, lvlUSD has been integrated with DeFi protocols such as Pendle, Spectra and LayerZero, and can be used as collateral on Morpho.
“Their fully on-chain, transparent approach to yield generation sets them apart from competitors relying on opaque, centralized methods,” said Sven Wellmann of Polychain, one of the investors in the protocol.
According to Level’s calculation, the protocol outpaced rival stablecoins’ yield offerings over the past month, which has helped its supply surpass $80 million in five months since its beta launch.
With the latest funding, Level plans to expand their team and marketing efforts while continuing to expand utility for lvlUSD beyond staking it, Kedian Sun explained. The protocol also plans to tap into Morpho to generate yield in the next few weeks.
With those efforts, lvlUSD could potentially push towards a $200-$250 million market cap, a key milestone the team wants to achieve, Sun said.