Obex, a new cryptocurrency incubator, has raised $37 million to support building the next generation of yield-generating stablecoins led by Framework Ventures, LayerZero and the Sky ecosystem, the team told CoinDesk in an interview.
The initiative aimed to invest and provide capital in projects that bring real-world, asset-backed strategies online, bringing institutional-grade risk controls and underwriting practices to the rapidly evolving industry.
Obex will be the latest capital allocator for Sky, the entity formerly known as MakerDAO behind the DAI and USDS stablecoins with a combined market capitalization of $9 billion, providing funding for projects to scale from the protocol’s vast reserves and extract yield from their strategies.
“As we see stablecoins reach a trillion [dollar market]“I think yield stablecoins are evolving even faster,” Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, told CoinDesk in an interview.
Stablecoins, a group of cryptocurrencies that aim to maintain a stable price anchored to an external asset like the US dollar, are a rapidly growing asset class. Although they are primarily backed by fiat currency and government bonds and are increasingly used for cross-border payments, an emerging group of tokens seeks to offer a competitive return to their holders through back-end investment strategies. Often dubbed synthetic stablecoins, the most notable example among them is Ethena’s $8 billion USDE token, which generates yield by holding cryptos in spot while simultaneously selling an equal amount of derivatives for a neutral trading position.
However, some support strategies could prove risky, causing tokens to lose their supposed price anchor. A series of synthetic stablecoins, including Stream Finance’s USDX and Elixir’s deUSD, recently lost their foothold following a contagion in DeFi triggered by the decentralized protocol Balancer exploit.
Obex was designed to avoid these stablecoin failures, which highlighted the need for more rigorous oversight and better technical foundations, Spencer said. “We can’t let people create $500 million stablecoins and blow them up,” he said. “Sky has the infrastructure to scale them safely.”
The initiative will focus on stablecoins backed by high-quality real-world collateral focused on three key areas: compute credits, such as tokenized GPU infrastructure; energy assets such as municipal-scale solar and battery deployments; and loans to large fintechs, which often do not have access to credit lines despite their size.
The incubator will run a 12-week program for start-up teams, providing capital, technical resources and access to Sky’s infrastructure.
Teams that pass risk and governance reviews may be eligible for additional capital from Sky, which recently authorized in a governance vote to deploy up to $2.5 billion in USDS into Obex projects.
Spencer described Obex as a “Y Combinator for stablecoins,” a reference to the influential Silicon Valley startup accelerator. “You look around San Francisco and see stablecoin ads everywhere. We get five to 10 pitches every day,” he said. “The energy is there.”
“What’s missing is the infrastructure: to properly underwrite these ideas, make them safe, and actually scale them,” he added.
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