Our Investment in Hedge: Never Sell Your SOL

We are excited to announce that Race Capital has led the $3.7M seed investment into Hedge, an interest-free liquidity platform building on Solana, partnering with Sebastian Grubb, Chris Coudron, and the Hedge team.

Hedge is building Solana (SOL) based vaults which allow holders to deposit their assets and instantly borrow against them with 0% interest. In exchange, borrowers will get USH,a fully backed collateralized stablecoin, which will have utility across the entire Solana DeFi ecosystem and beyond.

We believe in Sebastian and Chris and the market opportunity of decentralized stablecoins, and the further growth of DeFi on Solana.

Strong Team from Google and Salesforce

We at Race Capital always look for strong technical founders with the ability to ship quickly, and the Hedge team is no better example of this.

Sebastian Grubb was a former Product Manager at Google on the Android and YouTube teams.

Chris Coudron was formerly the co-founder and CTO of Work.com (formerly Choicepass) which was acquired by Salesforce.

Financial infrastructure is one of these technical areas where you need strong technical experience in scaling systems to production — so other developers can trust and adopt it into their own applications.

Market Opportunity for Decentralized Stablecoins

Truly decentralized stablecoins is one of the highest asymmetric opportunities out there (ex. Terra & UST) and Hedge is building the native collateralized version on Solana (USH). Over the last year, Terra’s UST and other decentralized stablecoins have continued to capture more and more of the overall stablecoin market share.

We are still in the early innings of DeFi on Solana and we expect Hedge and USH to open up a whole new set of possibilities for developers and users in the space. USDC is great for many use cases but the collateralized decentralized version opens up a whole host of integrations with other DeFi applications including: vaults, yields, savings, payments, debt markets, remittances, and many others.

Never Sell Your SOL

We believe that Hedge and collateralized vaults are one of the core missing pieces of the puzzle to improve the entire Solana DeFi ecosystem.

Currently around ~80% of SOL in the $50 billion Solana ecosystem is not being utilized in DeFi but is rather locked up in simple staking contracts. There is a huge opportunity within the Solana ecosystem for individual holders to not have to sell their SOL, and be able to use it for more productive means without losing out on future upsides.

We look forward to working closely with Sebastian & Chris, and helping the team to redefine the future of DeFi on Solana.