Kintsu Secures $4M in Seed Funding Led by Castle Island Ventures to Catalyze Monad DeFi with Liquid Staking

[PRESS RELEASE – New York, New York, July 25th, 2024]

Kintsu, an innovative liquid staking protocol, is thrilled to announce the successful completion of its $4 million seed funding round. The round was led by Castle Island Ventures, with additional support from prominent investors including Brevan Howard Digital, CMT Digital, Spartan Group, Breed VC, Arche Capital, CMS Holdings, Animoca Ventures, F-Prime Capital (a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments), Reciprocal Ventures, and LBank Labs. Notable angels such as Marin Tvrdić from Lido and Robinson Burkey from Wormhole also participated in this round, alongside Chris Hermida from Switchboard, Alex Matthews & Ross Trachtman from Brevan Howard Digital, Geoff Renaud from Renaud Partners, and Sean Lippel from Fintech Collective.

Driving Innovation in Liquid Staking

Kintsu is set to revolutionize the DeFi space with its next-generation liquid staking solutions. Historically staking and DeFi have to compete with each other, playing security and liquidity in the base layer token against each other. Kintsu provides Monad with composable staking rewards, enhancing liquidity, and improving security for the parallelized EVM. With a decentralized validator registry, Kintsu’s core smart contracts are designed such that validators can join permissionlessly while the community governs what percentage of the total staking pool goes to each. This funding will be instrumental in accelerating the development and growth of Kintsu’s composable liquid staking middleware on Monad.

Strategic Vision and Future Plans

With the successful seed funding round, Kintsu is poised to catalyze the Monad DeFi ecosystem by offering a turnkey way for developers to integrate staking into their protocols. At Kintsu, they believe that DeFi would be more efficient with LSTs as core routing tokens and collateral. Building on the shoulders of giants like Lido & Jito, Kintsu leverages best practices forged from multi billion dollar TVL protocols, while advancing DAO participation.

The category of “Liquid” Staking Protocols (“LST”) was heralded in largely by Ethereum. After the beacon chain first went live, genesis validators didn’t have the option to unstake for an unknown duration that amounted to over 1,000 days before the Merge was completed. Kintsu is indeed a “Liquid” Staking Protocol, but perhaps even more importantly, it is a “Composable” Staking Protocol.

About Kintsu

Kintsu is at the forefront of DeFi innovation, offering next-generation liquid staking infra that provides enhanced liquidity and security through composable staking rewards. Built on the Monad network, Kintsu’s platform is designed to cater to the evolving needs of the digital asset ecosystem, ensuring a seamless and potentially rewarding staking experience for users.

X

About Castle Island Ventures

Castle Island Ventures is a leading venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in blockchain technology and decentralized finance. With a portfolio of innovative companies, Castle Island Ventures is dedicated to supporting the next generation of blockchain entrepreneurs and fostering the growth of the decentralized ecosystem.