DeFi Credit Protocol Concordia Raises $4M in Round Led by Tribe, Kraken

Concordia, a multi-chain risk and collateral management protocol for digital assets, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round co-led by Tribe Capital and Kraken Ventures, with Cypher Capital and Saison Capital among the other participants.

The fundraise follows the protocol’s public testnet launch on Aptos earlier this month. The mainnet launch is expected to follow within the next several months, and Concordia will concurrently launch on additional chains.

Since the so-called “DeFi Summer” of 2020, decentralized finance has grown increasingly fragmented, making it difficult for users to transfer assets or access liquidity between blockchains. Cross-chain bridges can help with this problem, but are also a hotbed of security risks. Streamlining the process, reducing the risks and introducing compliance could bring more decentralized and traditional finance (TradFi) players into the space.

Concordia wants to make it easier for users to access and manage cross-chain liquidity and collateral. The protocol also offers users a simpler way to manage the collateral used for margin trading, a method of using borrowed money to buy or sell assets for a potential profit. Concordia users can manage that collateral from a single account and transfer assets from multiple blockchains without the need for wrapped tokens or bridges. The underlying application programming interface (API) architecture is modular – institutional investors, for example, could pick and choose what features they want to use. Developers who want to build using Concordia have access to the protocol’s shared pools of liquidity.

“We’re on a path to integrate across DeFi and TradFi,” said Thomas Ruble, chief technology officer of Concordia, in a statement. “To move real assets at the speed of frictionless blockchains is the goal everyone wants. Just as Main Street and Wall Street both enjoy the same World Wide Web, they have an equal interest in one global financial fabric.”