Union has raised $3M to bring Credit to Ethereum

Jacob Shiach
Union Finance
Published in
2 min readDec 17, 2020

I’m excited to share that Union has raised $3M in funding to build a global, permission-less credit network, enabling any person, or smart contract, with access to Ethereum the ability to accrue credit.

A Scene from Moebius’ Le Garage Hermetique

The Problem Union Solves

Without the presence of a functioning credit system, the only ones who can benefit from debt are those who already have sufficient assets they can borrow against.

While many lending protocols in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) are technically open and permission-less, collateralized borrowing is in practice only useful for the rich, and until more productive collateral is onboarded, it’s primary use will be to speculate on price.

A mostly Zero-Sum activity. In order for you to gain, someone else must lose. And in order for such an asset-backed economy to grow, new buyers must constantly be recruited.

Over time, this discrepancy can very quickly create an ossified economy of haves and have nots, as those with wealth are able to grow at a leveraged pace, while those without — especially if they entered later — are only able to grow at a nominal pace.

This is the current state of DeFi and Crypto in general.

It is our mission with Union to provide the means for DeFi to evolve into a more positive-sum economy; capable of lending funds natively to builders, communities, and friends.

We are excited to be backed by Placeholder, 1kx, CoinFund, Distributed Global, Spartan Group, Variant, KR1, Scalar, Defiance, and Infinite Capital.

And especially grateful for investment from some of the most experienced and driven founders in the space: Fernando Martinelli, Jake Brukhman, Thomas Bailey, Kain & Jordan, Michael Dunworth, Ryan Sean Adams, Tyler Spalding, Patricio Worthalter, Henry Ault, and Joe Lalluz.

What’s Next / Build with Us.

Union will be kicking off an open beta on test-net this month.

If you are interested in building credit products, contributing to make a member-owned Credit DAO (re: cooperative) a reality, or just curious to to learn more; We invite you to join us on Discord or sign up on the waitlist to receive Beta testing instructions directly.

With this funding, we are also growing our team! We are hiring across the board — engineering, design, operations. If you are interested in joining the team, send me a note at jacob@union.finance.

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