Kiln, an enterprise-grade staking platform, today announced the completion of a $5 million funding round. The funding round included Third Kind Managing Partner and Andreessen Horowitz board partner Shana Fisher, SV Angel, Blue Yard, Alven, and Kima Ventures.
The Kiln team will use the funds to bring on new talent, enhance its technology and build out its service, which enables fintech, crypto companies, and financial institutions to offer 1-click staking of crypto assets to their customers or to stake their own crypto-assets directly with Kiln.
“We believe staking is the most natural yield in crypto, and we enable businesses to stake directly, or to white-label staking functionality into their products. Staking is a core primitive of this new world: by enabling asset owners to use their stake to secure the network and earn a yield doing so, staking preserves decentralization and provides returns. It is the Internet bond.”
– Kiln Co-Founder & CEO, Laszlo Szabo
Kiln’s staking-as-a-service product, can be offered directly to institutional customers, or as a staking button for companies to integrate staking services into their business. Both come with integrations with all major wallets and custodians, automated rewards management, and a comprehensive monitoring solution, available through a dashboard or an API.
Currently, Kiln supports the staking of Ethereum, Solana, Tezos, NEAR, Terra, and Cosmos, with many more blockchains in the pipeline.
Among cryptocurrencies, Solana, Terra, and Cardano are among the largest cryptocurrencies using proof of stake, with Ethereum in the process of transitioning to proof of stake. Ether is second only to Bitcoin in market capitalization. The market cap of the top 35 proof of stake assets is over $500B.
Proof-of-stake is an alternative way to validate blocks on blockchains, where validators put a given token amount as collateral to gain the right to validate blocks and collect rewards. Since there are no miners expending energy to solve a cryptographical problem as is the case in proof of work, proof-of-stake is an efficient and climate-friendly way to preserve decentralization.
Based in Paris, Kiln focuses on B2B in Europe. Kiln’s founding team includes Laszlo Szabo, previously the co-founder of tech recruitment firm Skill Hunter; Ernest Oppetit, a former product manager at Improbable and Qubit; and Thomas de Phuoc, who was previously the Country Lead for France at Circle.
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