Announcing our $2.5M Seed Round
The round is led by Chapter One & IDEO CoLab Ventures with participation from Alchemy Ventures and Hypersphere Ventures.
It’s been quite the week here at Bond Protocol! We are excited to announce that we’ve raised $2.5M in seed funding to accelerate our mission to become the standard in on-chain capital raises. The investment was led by Chapter One & IDEO CoLab Ventures with participation from Alchemy Ventures and Hypersphere Ventures, among other strategic angel investors. OlympusDAO, the pioneer in our bonds-as-a-service model, remains a strategic partner and advisor.
Support from the aforementioned visionaries, builders, and leaders in the space is a monumental milestone in our journey to provide a comprehensive platform for capital raises for protocols in DeFi and beyond — any cycle, any stage.
“Bond Protocol’s asset accrual mechanism is a key first step in delivering value to a massive total addressable market in crypto,” says Jack Lipstone, Investment Partner at Chapter One, an early stage web3 fund. “Chapter One looks to support companies that make web3 as easy to use as web2, and Bond Protocol is at the forefront of DAO-to-DAO innovation. We are excited to be a part of their journey as lead investors.”
Our Mission
DAOs reliant on renting liquidity (yield farming) are extremely vulnerable to mercenary capital, token inflation, and token price drops. Often they experience an accelerated snowball effect of downward sell pressure to further exacerbate their fragile liquidity. Even the most established treasuries in crypto are overweight in their native governance tokens. As we collectively trudge through the crypto winter, these issues are becoming increasingly apparent — protocols are halting growth initiatives, reducing contributor headcount, and grappling with upset communities.
We believe that POL (protocol-owned liquidity) and treasury diversification are critical, albeit complex, solutions to these problems for crypto projects of any stage that will drive our space forward. Through our “bonds-as-a-service” model, Bond Protocol empowers protocols to immediately launch governance bond programs to acquire strategic assets from their communities (liquidity, stables, any ERC-20) — without having to allocate engineering resources to architect and maintain costly home-grown solutions.
Protocols launching bond programs realize a number of long-term benefits for themselves and their community: increased runway, reduced insolvency risks, protection against market downturns, inflation and burn rate control, mitigation of token sell pressure, and the ability to fund strategic growth initiatives at any time.
“It’s a huge benefit for crypto protocols to easily utilize treasury diversification and protocol-owned liquidity,” says Paris Rouzati, General Partner at IDEO CoLab Ventures. “Bond Protocol allows Web3 communities to control their own destiny and support their capital needs for sustainable growth through permissionless and composable bond markets.”
How it works
Bond Protocol improves on its successful proof-of-concept, which previously worked with 50+ partners on 7 blockchains, through a permissionless architecture that enables any crypto protocol to quickly setup, configure, and launch its own bond programs to capture liquidity and diversify its treasury holdings.
Once bonds are launched, existing and prospective community members can purchase governance tokens at a dynamically priced discount (“bonding”). As protocols acquire their liquidity and diversify treasury holdings, their success is less dependent on inflationary liquidity rental programs and the price action of their native tokens.
Bond Protocol also tokenizes users’ bond positions to open up new verticals for vested governance tokens in DeFi. We look forward to pioneering new use cases for bonds, from lending to secondary markets, as we continue to build out new products for different stages of protocols. Our dApp is currently in open beta and provides access to Olympus-style bonds with a novel auction implementation.
What’s next
Bond Protocol’s founding team will use the fresh funding to accelerate product and business development efforts. We have an ambitious roadmap including new bond types, auction mechanisms, blockchain deployments, and platform integrations.
We believe the ease of deployment and the flexibility our permissionless architecture provides will unlock a myriad of new use cases for our Partners, Community and DeFi at-large. We Build!
Get Involved
To learn more about Bond Protocol, check out our landing page and documentation or join our Discord Community. Feel free to ask questions in our #learn-bonds channel!
To start bonding, check out our dApp (now in open beta) or our primer on bonding.
For protocols wanting to launch bonds, please reach out in Discord or to partner@bondprotocol.finance
For press inquiries, please contact PR@bondprotocol.finance
