The decentralized finance protocol Veda has raised $18 million to accelerate the adoption of its vault platform. It enables asset issuers to build crosschain yield products, including yield-bearing stablecoins. The funding round was led by venture capital firm CoinFund, with additional participation from Coinbase Ventures, Animoca Ventures, BitGo, Mantle EcoFund, GSR, Relayer Capital, PEER VC, Draper Dragon, Credit Neutral, Neartcore and Maelstrom. Veda’s angel investors include the co-founders of Anchorage, Ether.Fi and Polygon. Veda is a protocol for tokenizing a wide range of DeFi applications, including liquid staking tokens, yield-bearing savings accounts and stablecoins. The total monetary value of assets locked on Veda has reached $3.3 billion, according to industry data. Veda has identified a growing demand for Bitcoin yield generation, despite its challenges. Veda is addressing this challenge through its partnership with Lombard, the developer of the liquid-staked Bitcoin on Babylon.

The CoinFund’s investment in Vera partly reflects its growing conviction that stablecoin adoption is accelerating and bringing more wealth onchain. The natural next step for wealth onchain is to earn yield and to make people’s assets (fiat currency or digital assets) productive. The yield-bearing stablecoins are much more convenient way of earning low-risk yield on fiat than traditional bank savings and money market accounts. Once we have more and more yield-bearing stablecoins, the traditional bank savings accounts will be endangered and will need to evolve. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire recently said that the widespread stablecoin adoption is approaching, predicting that these assets will soon experience their “iPhone moment”. Circle’s USDC is the second-largest stablecoin, with more than $61 billion in circulation. Tether’s USDT is the largest stablecoin with a value of nearly $156 billion.