Venture Trotter Weekly Review: A Web3 social media platform let’s you trade tokenized shares of profiles

A new Web3 social media platform is enabling users to buy and trade shares (known in app as “Keys”) in each other. Friend.tech raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round that was led by Paradigm. The platform began inviting influencers with large Twitter followings in order to hit the ground running during its launch in early August 2023. Per Dune, early activity on Friend.tech has been massive, with over 2 million transactions and counting during the platforms first month. At one point, it’s 24-hour fee generation ranked third on DeFiLama, behind only Ethereum and Lido.

This project has been a major topic of discussion for the crypto community on X since its launch, but it has also been a subject of controversy over privacy concerns. The Block published a tweet here about a so-called “leaked database,” however that tweet has since been fact checked by X’s community notes, which asserts that the “leaked” info about content creators was already public.

By the way, Ruceto is jumping into the Web3 social media space with our upcoming deep dive analysis of CyberConnect. In that report, we discuss Friend.tech along with the rest of the Web3 social competitive landscape. Look out for that report this week!

A team of former bankers and credit investment professionals built infrastructure to connect institutional lenders and borrowers. Maple, an on-chain capital market, raised $5MM in a round led by Blocktower Capital and Tioga Capital. Maple was developed with an institutional focus, and it dubs itself as “the only on-chain marketplace focused exclusively on serving Institutional and Individual Accredited Investors with high-quality lending opportunities which suit their liquidity, risk and return requirements.” Because of their institutional focus, it partners with regulated service provides to provide KYC and AML checks on both lenders and borrowers as well as enterprise-tier custody and wallet solution.

Maple recently opened a lending pool that we designed specifically for DAO treasuries. Deposited funds go to a special-purpose vehicle that is only permitted to buy short term US Treasuries as collateral. If a borrower defaults, Maple will sell those T-bills and use the proceeds to repay the borrowers.

The native asset of Maple is MPL, which is used for governance and staking. The staking program was designed to distribute MPL bought on the open market to stakers, but its distributions are currently paused because, “revenues do not currently exceed operating expenses.”

A DeFi yield protocol aims to enable users to increase yield exposure in bull markets and hedge against yield downturns in bear markets. Pendle, which allows for the tokenization of yield, raised an undisclosed amount in an investment from Binance Labs. Per Binance Labs, Pendle is, “bringing the TradFi interest derivative market to DeFi.” A yield bearing token is broken up into its yield components, a principal token (PT) and a yield token (YT). Both the PT and YT can be traded on Pendle’s AMM. Per the company docs, advanced yield strategies that are made possible with this tokenization of components include: 1) Fixed yield (e.g. earn fixed yield on stETH); 2) Long yield (e.g. bet on stETH yield going up by purchasing more yield); 3) Earn more yield without additional risks (e.g. provide liquidity with your stETH).

List of VC Investments into Crypto Projects

The full list of the institutional investments that Ruceto tracked last week is below. Links to the target company website, investment announcement, and token info are provided via hyperlinks on the Target Name, $ Raised, and Token columns respectively.