Veda Raises $18 Million to Boost Cross-Chain Yield Products

Veda, a decentralized finance protocol, has successfully raised $18 million in funding to accelerate the adoption of its vault platform. This platform enables asset issuers to build cross-chain yield products, including yield-bearing stablecoins. The funding round was led by venture capital firm CoinFund, with additional participation from several prominent investors, including Coinbase Ventures, Animoca Ventures, BitGo, Mantle EcoFund, GSR, Relayer Capital, PEER VC, Draper Dragon, Credit Neutral, Neartcore, and Maelstrom. The company announced this development on Monday.

Veda’s angel investors include the co-founders of Anchorage, Ether.Fi, and Polygon. Launched in 2024, Veda is a protocol designed to tokenize a wide range of DeFi applications, including liquid staking tokens, yield-bearing savings accounts, and stablecoins. It supports some of the largest vaults in the crypto space, powering platforms such as Ether.fi’s Liquid, Mantle’s cmETH, and the Lombard DeFi Vault. The total monetary value of assets locked on Veda has surpassed $3.3 billion, according to industry data.

Veda has identified a growing demand for Bitcoin (BTC) yield generation, despite the challenges involved. “Demand for dependable Bitcoin yield is high, but harvesting even a modest few-percent yield is often complex and time-consuming,” stated Sun Raghupathi, Veda’s co-founder and CEO. Veda is addressing this challenge through its partnership with Lombard, the developer of the liquid-staked Bitcoin on Babylon.

CoinFund’s investment in Veda reflects its growing conviction that stablecoin adoption is accelerating and bringing more wealth on-chain. “The natural next step for wealth on-chain is to earn yield and to make your assets (fiat currency or digital assets) productive,” said David Pakman, CoinFund’s managing partner and head of venture investments. When asked about the rise of yield-bearing stablecoins, which have reportedly unsettled the traditional banking lobby, Pakman called them an “inevitability,” adding that they are “a much more convenient way of earning low-risk yield on fiat than traditional bank savings and money market accounts.”

“I do agree that, once we have more and more yield-bearing stablecoins, traditional bank savings accounts will be endangered and need to evolve,” Pakman added. The stablecoin market is dominated by Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT, with USDC being the second-largest stablecoin with more than $61 billion in circulation and USDT being the largest with a value of nearly $156 billion. The widespread adoption of stablecoins is approaching, with predictions that these assets will soon experience their “iPhone moment.”