Breaking news! A group of veteran traditional finance professionals have just locked in $17 million in U.S. dollars, and they’re eyeing a $320 billion stablecoin “cake”—no token issuance, but there’s a hidden threat behind it?

Let’s talk about a project today, OpenTrade. Don’t rush to scroll away, first look at a few numbers:

In May this year, this London-based crypto startup secured another $17 million in strategic funding, led jointly by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital, with a16z crypto participating. The total funding has now exceeded $30 million. The new funds will be used to expand licensed and unlicensed infrastructure, grow the asset management team, increase engineering capacity, and also build a dedicated customer success team.

Why are investors willing to pour money in? Because the stablecoin sector is too lucrative. According to DeFiLlama data, the total supply of stablecoins has already surpassed $320 billion. The profit opportunities derived from this have attracted many startups, and OpenTrade is one of them.

OpenTrade, simply put, is an infrastructure platform specializing in stablecoin yields. It helps fintech companies provide secure, compliant, and scalable stablecoin lending and yield products. It’s not just a pure DeFi protocol, nor traditional asset management, but a combination of blockchain technology, legal frameworks, and offline banking infrastructure, creating a “yield-as-a-service” model. Financial institutions don’t need to build their own on-chain architecture from scratch; they can directly embed yield products for USD stablecoins (like $USDC, $USDT) or EUR stablecoins ($EURC) into their apps, wallets, or treasury management systems.

Its operational logic is straightforward, centered around a “three-layer stacking”: blockchain protocol layer, API/Web application layer, and compliance infrastructure. The OpenTrade protocol is a fork of Circle Research’s open-source lending protocol Perimeter, mainly deployed on Ethereum and Avalanche, based on ERC-4626 and ERC-20 standards. Supported stablecoins can be deposited, lent, and earn interest. Institutions can interact via web or API, or develop their own front-end.

Currently, OpenTrade’s main products focus on stablecoin yields, including treasury management and yield products. Institutions deposit $USDC, $USDT, or $EURC into different “Vaults,” with the backend automatically matching the underlying assets. The website displays several vaults: US Treasury bonds and money market funds with an annualized yield of about 3.85%; BlackRock high-yield corporate bond ETF, around 7.00%; commercial paper, trade finance, ABS, CLOs, private credit, ranging from 5% to 14%; as well as Managed DeFi Vault (blue-chip DeFi portfolio) and upcoming Emerging Market Bonds.

The general process is: fintech firms, exchanges, or new banks connect the protocol into their products via OpenTrade’s API or SDK. Users select a vault in the app, deposit stablecoins. Funds go into the corresponding vault via smart contracts, generating share tokens that record ownership in real-time. The underlying assets are managed by regulated asset managers, held in bankruptcy-remote SPVs. RWA yields (like government bond interest) or DeFi strategy yields are accumulated in real-time into the vault, allowing users to redeem principal plus interest at any time, without waiting for traditional bank settlements.

This design can serve licensed scenarios (compliance needs of institutions and banks) and also provide permissionless layer services for non-custodial platforms and asset issuers. Currently, the platform’s TVL exceeds $200 million, with a projected transaction volume of over $250 million in 2025.

Team background is worth mentioning. CEO Dave Sutter and Chief Business Officer Jeff Handler are college friends, both graduates of Washington University in St. Louis. They both got into Bitcoin in 2012, co-founded an early Bitcoin think tank, and launched one of the first Bitcoin wallets on the iOS App Store. That project won the university’s business plan competition, judged by future CTO Tom Niermann. They later iterated multiple times, developing early USD-pegged stablecoins and tokenized RWAs on public chains, including invoice financing. Dave Sutter also collaborated with Coinbase and Circle’s Centre consortium to promote the USDC standard and governance.

Finally, a key point: Currently, OpenTrade’s official documentation does not disclose any airdrop or token issuance plans. Think about it, reflect on it.

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