A New Platform for DeFi
A group of three former Coinbase product and engineering veterans have raised $4.1 million to create a platform called Definitive, aiming to make DeFi’s emerging capital markets more accessible for Wall Street. The startup seeks to automate many aspects of the decentralized finance world, making it easier for newcomers to navigate these emerging products.
For example, investors can deposit funds into a SOL secured put vault on the Solana application Psyfi.io, yielding 9.15% APY, or borrow ETH through Aave at a rate of 3.19%. While these terms are favorable compared to traditional finance, the manual processes involved in using these products can be cumbersome for funds. Definitive aims to bridge this gap with its execution platform for DeFi by seamlessly integrating with various protocols.
DeFi without the headaches
“Investors are seeing they can do 15% on these different vaults,” Prasad said. “Today, however, they go to whatever DeFi application but it is very manual to use them.”
“They will want a one-click but to do that you need to understand the smart contracts, claim rewards, monitor the position in real time. And what happens if the protocols rugs,” he added. “You have a loan in Aave and you borrowed against it, you have to manually check the health of the loan and what if your DeFi guy is on holiday and misses that the loans gets into these risky positions.”
The goal is to provide investors with services commonly available on centralized exchanges and within the traditional financial sector. In addition to Definitive, other startups like Architect and Fordefi are also working on tools and wallets tailored for institutional use in the DeFi sector.
Definitive has garnered support from Nascent, Coinbase Ventures, CMT Digital, and BlockTower led the round. The team behind Definitive includes former Coinbase employees Jai Prasad, Dennis Qian, and Blake Arnold.
Hot Take: Professionalizing DeFi Access
Few in the space rival the experience and expertise of the Definitive team when it comes to DeFi and institutional crypto markets,” commented BlockTower’s Thomas Klocanas. “We’re extremely excited to back them in their journey to professionalize and standardize access to DeFi in a way that truly enables broader institutional participation in these markets, by solving critical elements at the protocol integration/access, and at the risk management and execution layers.”
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