Superform Labs, a cryptocurrency startup founded by two former BlockTower Capital investors and a former Microsoft product manager, has raised $6.5 million in seed and angel funding rounds.
Polychain Capital led the seed round, with participation from BlockTower Capital, Maven 11, Circle Ventures and others, Superform said Wednesday. Angel investors in this round included Arthur Hayes, Marc Bhargava, Avi Felman, Michael Bucella, and Bryan Pellegrino.
The seed round closed in November 2022, but Superform waited to announce it alongside its marketplace launch in early access mode, Superform co-founder Blake Richardson told The Block. The round consisted of shares with token warrants and declined to comment on valuation.
Richardson founded Superform with former BlockTower colleague Vikram Arun and Alex Cort, a former Microsoft product manager. At BlockTower, Richardson said he and Arun ran a nine-figure DeFi fund and were struggling to manage yield positions across blockchains on a daily basis. Therefore, they decided to create Superform.
“Handling positions on more than 15 chains simultaneously was difficult and complex,” said Richardson. “We left this great role at BlockTower because we needed to build a solution that was accessible to everyone. BlockTower Capital supported us through the transition, becoming our second largest backer in our seed round,” he added. Yes.
Superform, a cryptocurrency yield market
Superform is a permissionless cross-chain yield marketplace that allows DeFi protocols to list vaults or asset pools. Cryptocurrency users, on the other hand, can deposit funds into those vaults and earn profits.
“Superform is the first place to list yields without permission,” Richardson said. “We abstract away swapping and bridging and allow you to do everything from a single interface, making it the simplest place to discover, deposit and manage your earnings.”
After a user deposits funds, Superform issues a tokenized representation of the deposit amount called SuperPosition. This SuperPosition allows for “infinitely configurable combinations” of yields, Richardson said. “Imagine a tokenized representation of Arbitrum’s liquid re-staked ETH deposited in Optimism’s lending vault, now possible in any combination of interactions across the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM),” he added.
Superform launches today in early access mode on seven EVM-compatible networks: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Avalanche C-Chain, and BNB Chain, with plans to expand to other blockchains in the future.
Superform is leveraging blockchain infrastructure from LayerZero, Hyperlane, Wormhole, Li.Fi and Socket to market, Richardson said. He added that Superform’s public launch is scheduled for the first quarter.
Superform Rewards Program
To reward users, Superform is launching a program called SuperFrens. Season 0 of the show will be available for early access users, and the first season will begin next month with the platform’s open access release, Richardson said.
Richardson added that SuperFrens is a “gamified, on-chain” rewards system that allows users to compete against each other to achieve the highest rankings on monthly leaderboards.
SuperFrens are NFTs with a fixed supply, and collecting multiple NFTs in a tier can entitle users to future rewards and exclusive benefits, Richardson said. He declined to comment on whether these benefits include native token airdrops, but did say that SuperPositions can be converted to ERC-20 tokens and that Superform will remain decentralized.
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