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There is a new institutional Defi-yield platform in the city, we have learned exclusively.
Upshift, which is aimed at giving access to the retail trade to give opportunities that are usually available for hedge funds, is spun from Prime Brokeragebedrijf August and comes from Stealth.
The platform already has about $ 250 million in deposits, the team told me.
“If you look at the Value Prop today, Defi is super complicated,” explained Upsshift CEO and co-founder of August Alexandre Elkrief.
“It is on three main axes: it is fragmented, it is difficult to gain access, and it is a lot more complex to manage fragments, of course, because we have gone from one chain to a Gazillion chains. It is clear that it will not stop today. [August supports] 15 Necklaces, right? And so the retail user will not re -balance his position in so many different opportunities, and it will be a full -time job, ”Elkrief continued.
Elkrief and co-founder and CEO of August, Aya Kantorovich, are not strangers for this space. Kantorovich was part of the founder for brokerage company Falconx, and Elkrief spent some time running the books for a Defi Hedgefonds. The two initially started working on Fractal, later renamed August, and started fundraising just before the FTX collapsed and closed the deal “The week FTX collapsed,” Kantorovich said.
She admitted that both founders had the feeling that they then lost a few years of their lives, but it also strengthened their beliefs in the need for both an August and a switch in Crypto.
And so far their work has paid off. August earlier this month raised $ 10 million in a round led by Dragonfly. It focuses on giving Defi -access to institutions by connecting them to networks such as Aave or Uniswap, and facilitates around $ 7 billion in monthly volume.
Upshift, which has been in beta since September in September, is focused on the retail side of things. That was a central point for me, given that we have not seen any retail activity levels return.
“Our hypothesis is that it is a matter of complexity,” Elkrief said. Retail is really forced to concentrate on things like Memecoins, which are now clearly out of fashion.
And this market is aimed at ‘wages simple products’, Kantorovich noted.
“If you zoom out for a second, the value proposition of the proceeds is generally the onboarding mechanism for all types of new financial products. Crypto aside, Marcus by Goldman Sachs began to have users by having a savings account of 4%, anyway … we give every power’s option to enlarge their product.”
In essence, power expenses can then collaborate with hedge funds or managers to put together and pack the product to offer yield. Hopefully on the other side also go to boarding to the product.
While the Road Card of Augustus is about integrating a custodian, Elkrief said, a product itself becomes a product in itself. The team “works” the movements to split the Augustus and upperform teams apart at the moment, where Elkrief gets the helm.
