London-based Tenderize, a staking derivatives protocol, announced on Thursday that it has raised $3M (approximately €2.9M) in its Seed round of funding. The investment was led by Eden Block, a venture house dedicated to enabling a new digital future with blockchain.
Besides, the round also saw participation from other investors including TRGC, Encode Club, Figment, Daedalus Angels, and other angels from Messari, Livepeer, and Steakwallet.
What does Tenderize offer?
Tenderize helps users to stake up their crypto in a flexible model, earn staking rewards as TenderTokens, and still utilise capital in DeFi to benefit from multiple use-cases. The company is built for individuals and Web 3 protocols who want to maximise their holdings and efficiently allocate capital across DeFi to supercharge their earnings.
The company makes this possible by issuing ERC20-based derivatives, TenderTokens, which are pegged 1:1 to users’ staked assets. With derivatives, one can enjoy staking rewards while having full flexibility to expand crypto opportunities by providing liquidity or yield farming.
The company is working on both the front-end integrations (wallets, analytics platforms, etc.) and back-end integrations (tokens, custodial staking partners, exchanges) to show the user base a better way to stake.
Additionally, users can also swap back their earned TenderTokens for the original crypto asset they staked without the need for withdrawal periods.
Nico Vergauwen, Co-founder at Tenderize, says, “The team’s previous experience at projects like Livepeer, Pocket Network and Yearn gave us insight into the growing need for a better staking experience for web3 protocols. For the longest time users had to choose between liquidity and staking rewards/securing their network. With Tenderize’s liquid staking, users have both.”
Tenderize currently supports The Graph, Polygon, Livepeer, and Audius with support for the user’s favourite protocol coming soon.
What’s in the future?
According to the company, its ultimate goal is to enable permissionless liquid staking, which they see as the solution to issues that currently plague liquid staking systems (unpegging, centralisation, cartelisation, etc.). Any node operator and its delegators would be able to integrate with Tenderize without gatekeeping; the neutral stance ensures they add as much value as possible to every project that wants to empower its users – without sacrificing on decentralisation.
