Quick take:
The company plans to use the capital to scale its crypto yield products.
The DeFi protocol has just over $5 million in total value locked according to founder Rhett Shipp.
Superlayer, Avalaunch, GoGoPool, Daybreak Digital and Linda Kreitzman participated in the round.
Avant, an Avalanche-based decentralised finance protocol has raised $6.5 million in a seed round backed by Superlayer, Avalaunch, GoGoPool, Daybreak Digital and Linda Kreitzman.
The company offers the “stable-value” token avUSD, which can be staked to receive a yield-generating version of the token savUSD.
Users can mint avUSD by staking the USDC or the USDT stablecoins. The product is still in early access, allowing only a select group of whitelisted addresses to stake.
Avant plans to use the fresh capital to scale its crypto-yield generating neutral tokens without relying on centralised exchanges.
Avant has been compared to the Ethereum-based Ethena which offers the $ENA token. However, founder Rhett Shipp explained to The Block the key difference between the two.
“Ethena’s USDe generates yield via the ‘carry trade.’ The carry trade is very high yielding in some market conditions and less so in others,” he said. “Avant engages in the carry trade too but engages in other market-neutral trades when the carry trade is less profitable. So far, this has resulted in notably higher yields than Ethena produces. Furthermore, even when the carry trade is profitable, we believe we can perform it more productively than our peers.”
According to Shipp, the product currently has just over $5 million in total value locked and fewer than 10 depositors amid its early-access strategy of enabling staking for a few selected addresses. “That whitelist will expand over the next few weeks,” adding that the avUSD and the savUSD will be open to the public in December, which he believes will pave the way for the TVL to grow.
Avant makes money by charging at least 10% in fees on the yield generated from staked tokens and plans to launch its native token AVANT in the first quarter of 2025.
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