NFT-backed loan startup Unlockd closes $4.4 million seed round
Unlockd, a decentralized protocol offering cross-chain NFT liquidity, has raised $4.4 million in a seed funding round led by Blockchain Capital.
According to a Thursday announcement, the funding round saw participation from others like Spartan Group, Play Ventures, IDEO CoLab, Bitscale, Eden Ventures, Crypto Plaza, Sfermion, and angel investors such as YGG founder Gabby Dizon. Although Unlockd declined to share its valuation, it said that the capital injection would be used for cross-chain expansion, product development, marketing, and a tier 1 auditor to look into the protocol’s security.
The company is the brainchild of esports club MAD Lions founder Jorge Schnura and Carlos Otermin. Founding earlier this year, Unlockd enables a pooled liquidity model that allows NFT owners to borrow against their digital collectibles without losing access to them.
Speaking to reporters, Schnura noted that his company would initially focus on supporting gaming guilds, several of which are vested in the project. He said:
The other use case with guilds is when they pre-buy assets from games that are not launched. Those assets are unproductive assets. They just buy them at a discount. The good thing with this is that you can now borrow against them so you get liquidity from those assets and now suddenly they do become productive assets.
Meanwhile, Unlockd already has a beta version on a testnet. The protocol is currently undergoing auditing, with a launch on the mainnet scheduled for October. In the first phase of the rollout, the protocol will support over 25 Ethereum-based NFT collections.
