Paris-based staking technology provider Kiln bags €17M led by Illuminate Financial

Paris-based Kiln, a company that makes enterprise-grade staking easy, announced on Monday that it has raised €17M in a fresh round of funding to expand its staking infrastructure product range.

Kiln, which has more than $500M in AUM, received funding from Illuminate Financial with support from a number of top cryptocurrency investment firms, including Consensys, GSR, Kraken Ventures, Leadblock Partners, Sparkle Ventures, and XBTO. Existing investors 3KVC, Blue Yard Capital, SV Angel, and Alven also participated in this round.

Rezso Szabo, Partner at Illuminate Financial, says, “We are witnessing a once-in-a-generation change that will catalyse the institutionalisation of Digital Assets. Sophisticated users and institutions need enterprise-grade infrastructure. We believe the Kiln team has demonstrated they can build key infrastructure that is critical for both digital assets native institutions and will also serve as the future rails for financial services infrastructure. We are excited to partner with such a high-calibre team, who are on a mission to raise the bar in B2B infrastructure for the whole ecosystem.”

Enterprise-grade staking made easy

Staking is the Web3 industry’s native yield; it generates income by verifying and submitting blocks to the blockchain, which helps protect it. There is no counterparty risk, unlike in lending or when working with other parties like centralised exchanges.

Founded by Laszlo Szabo, Ernest Oppetit and Thomas de Phuoc, Kiln believes that the staking market must go beyond operating validators and become institutionalised to satisfy the expanding consumer need for risk spreading. This means developing APIs and services that are independent of validators. In turn, this makes it possible to stake digital assets anywhere they are kept, including in wallets, custodians, and exchanges.

The company mentions in a statement that it expects the demand for staking ETH to increase tremendously following the Ethereum network’s switch to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus (The Merge) in September – which greatly reduced the protocol roadmap’s risk. 

Only 12.5 per cent of the available ETH is now staked, compared to 50–80 per cent for other PoS assets. Additionally, since the Merge, ETH has had an annual percentage yield in the 6-7 per cent region, providing investors with an “attractive” return rate.

Some of Kiln’s customers include industry-leading companies such as Binance US, GSR and Ledger.

Capital utilisation

Kiln says it will use the funds to add new features to its product range. The company already offers the largest product range dedicated to staking on the market. The company’s products include:

• Kiln Connect, which offers a single SDK to link rewards data, custodian, and staking on all significant PoS blockchains
• Kiln On-Chain, offers seamless ETH staking, any amount of ETH, and automated rewards management through smart contracts
• Kiln Dashboard, which offers a dashboard for staking, a management interface, reporting capabilities, and data exporting
• Kiln Validators, a group of specialised or general-purpose validators, with enterprise-grade SLAs, deployed on multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure

Laszlo Szabo, co-founder of Kiln, says, “I am thrilled to close a robust funding round with such respected investors in the crypto space which will enable us to build out the next-generation market standard in staking technology. At Kiln, we believe it is critical to provide enterprise-grade infrastructure to institutional users, which in turn enables our customers to create new opportunities for their users. The Kiln team couldn’t be more excited about this next stage of building out a world-class staking stack.”