Quick take:
- The fundraising also attracted participation from Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and others.
- Mountain Protocol offers a yield-bearing stablecoin USDM “entirely backed by US treasuries.”
- The USDM total supply currently stands at 50 million tokens, with nearly 40 million tokens on Ethereum alone.
Mountain Protocol has completed an $8 million Series A round led by Multicoin Capital. The fundraising also attracted participation from Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and others.
The company offers the yield-earnings stablecoin USDM, which is backed one-to-one with the US dollar. The ERC-20 rebasing token currently provides about a 5% yield and is kept separate from the company’s operating accounts.
Launched in October 2023, Mountain Protocol’s USDM currently has a total supply of 50 million tokens. The company plans to use the fresh capital to ramp up that figure 10x to 500 million, Martin Carrica, co-founder and CEO of Mountain Protocol, told The Block.
Carrica added that nearly 40 million of the current token supply is on Ethereum.
The fundraising was a pure equity round and brings the total raised to $12 million, following a $4 million seed round announced last September.
Carrica added that the stablecoin is mainly being used to manage treasuries of decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), adding that the stablecoin will soon be made available for other use cases after the fresh funding.
There are also plans to expand the USDM offering to other blockchains including Solana, Aptos, Sei, and Monad, as well as, integrate with more DeFi protocols, before expanding to fintech firms, crypto exchanges and market makers.
“Market makers and traders are holding about 20% of their book on stablecoins. If they are able to hold that book on yield-bearing stablecoins and then continue engaging in their activity, they are very interested in doing the swap,” Carrica said.
The stablecoin market has emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments this year with multiple crypto companies launching new stablecoins. In April, Ripple launched a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar as it looks to wrestle the likes of Tether and Circle from their market dominance.
In the same month, VanEck Scion the investment firm founded by Nick Van Eck, the son of investment management veteran Jan Van Eck raised $12 million for its stablecoin entity Agora, while real-world asset stablecoin issuer Anzen last month expanded to multiple chains and protocols following a $4 million fundraising.
Such has been the rise in interest in stablecoins that Ethereum stablecoin volume on Ethereum has since surpassed $1 trillion.
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