"When a Bitcoin owner wants to generate yield from their holdings, they typically go to a third party. That middleman is usually a stablecoin issuer or exchange like Tether or Coinbase that allows the holder to swap their Bitcoin for collateral-in the form of stablecoin or wrapped BTC-to be used in lending protocols like Aave. Now a Stanford professor named David Tse is promoting a new alternative to those systems."
"Tse is the co-founder of a startup called Babylon that has created a decentralized protocol, called BTCVaults, which offers users a more direct way to collateralize their Bitcoin. On Wednesday, the company announced that it raised $15 million dollars from a16z crypto, the crypto arm of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Tse did not disclose Babylon's valuation in an interview with Fortune."
Babylon built BTCVaults, a decentralized protocol that allows users to collateralize Bitcoin without relinquishing control of private keys. The startup raised $15 million from a16z crypto and plans to integrate with the Aave lending protocol in Q2 2026. Babylon currently does not generate revenue but expects to after the Aave launch and employs more than 40 people. David Tse and Fisher Yu co-founded the company in 2021; the company has no CEO, with Tse serving as research scientist and Yu as CTO. Tse is a long-time Stanford professor with a PhD from MIT and prior teaching at UC Berkeley.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]