Obex, a new crypto incubator, has raised $37 million to support building the next generation of yield-generating stablecoins led by Framework Ventures, LayerZero and the Sky ecosystem, the team has told CoinDesk in an interview.
The initiative set out to invest and provide capital to projects that bring real-world asset-backed strategies onchain, bringing institutional-grade risk controls and underwriting practices to the fast-moving sector.
Obex will be the latest capital allocator of Sky, the entity formerly known as MakerDAO behind the DAI and USDS stablecoins with a combined $9 billion market cap, providing funding for projects to scale from the protocol’s vast reserves and earn yield from their strategies.
“While we see stablecoins going to a trillion [dollar market], I think yield-bearing stablecoins are moving even faster,” Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, told CoinDesk in an interview.
Stablecoins, a group of cryptocurrencies that aim to keep a stable price anchored to an external asset like the U.S. dollar, are rapidly growing asset class. While they are mostly backed by fiat money, government bonds and increasingly used for cross-border payments, an emerging group of tokens seek to offer competitive yield to holders through investment strategies in the backend. Often dubbed synthetic stablecoins, the most notable example among them Ethena’s $8 billion token USDE, which generates yield by holding spot cryptos while simultaneously shorting an equal amount of derivatives for a neutral trading position.
However, some backing strategies could turn out to be risky causing the tokens losing their supposed price anchor. A string of synthetic stablecoins, including Stream Finance’s USDX and Elixir’s deUSD, recently lost their peg following a contagion in DeFi triggered by decentralized protocol Balancer’s exploit.
Obex was designed to avoid these stablecoin failures, which highlighted the need for more rigorous oversight and better technical foundations, Spencer said. “We cannot have people creating $500 million stablecoins and blowing them up,” he said. “Sky has the infrastructure to scale these safely.”
The initiative will focus on stablecoins backed by high-quality, real-world collateral focusing on three key areas: compute credits, such as tokenized GPU infrastructure; energy assets like municipal-scale solar and battery deployments; and loans to large fintechs, which often lack access to credit lines despite their size.
The incubator will run a 12-week program for early-stage teams, offering capital, technical resources and access to Sky’s infrastructure.
Teams that pass risk and governance reviews may qualify for additional capital from Sky, which has recently authorized in a governance vote to deploy up to $2.5 billion in USDS into Obex projects.
Spencer described Obex as a “Y Combinator for stablecoins,” a reference to the influential Silicon Valley startup accelerator. “You look around San Francisco and see stablecoin ads everywhere. We receive five-to-ten pitches every day,” he said. “The energy is there.”
“What’s missing is infrastructure: to underwrite these ideas properly, to ensure they’re safe, and to actually bring them to scale,” he added.
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