Staked, an institutional start-up company that provides assistance to leading cryptocurrency investors, has raised $4.5 million in its first funding seed round, according to an announcement on Medium.
Some of the companies to invest in the seed round include Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Global Brain, Digital Currency Group, Winklevoss Capital, Applied Crypto Ventures, Blocktree Capital, and others.
Paul Veradittakit, a partner at Pantera Capital, will reportedly join Staked’s board of directors.
Staked was founded in April 2018, and this is the company’s first round of external capital funding.
The company assists institutional investors with staking or lending their holdings in proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies. Investors who hold a proof-of-stake token are paid in block rewards by staking their assets and running the server software that helps secure the blockchain.
A block reward is traditionally granted to miners who sequence a block of information to the blockchain. In a proof-of-work system, miners solve cryptographic puzzles to achieve this.
In Bitcoin, the reward is currently 12.5 Bitcoin, whereas Ethereum’s reward is three Ether. Ethereum functions with a proof-of-stake protocol and the block generator is determined by the stake (wealth).
The Staked system rewards participation with a yield that reaches between 5-100% annually in additional token rewards. However, it requires secure and highly available servers. Staked provides the infrastructure that is mandatory for staking.
Staked currently supports six tokens: Tezos, Dash, Decred, Livepeer, Factom, and EOS.
Its customers include top-tier crypto funds, venture capital funds, family offices, and hedge funds. It also offers a white-labelled staking platform that enables exchanges, custodians, and wallets to offer staking rewards to their customers without the need for expensive and complex technology.
Staked CEO and founder Tim Ogilvie said: “Investors have a growing number of options to compound their crypto assets, and Staked makes it easy to understand, access, and execute on the available opportunities.”
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