19th May 2022, Paris – London: Kiln, a leading enterprise-grade staking platform for institutions, crypto-native and fintech companies, 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.
Kiln 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 are proud to be building the leading staking platform to enable the growth and security of the decentralised world,” said co-founder and CEO Laszlo Szabo. “The world’s financial system is being rebuilt on blockchains. 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 decentralisation and provides returns. It is the Internet bond.”
Kiln brings this vision to life by providing a staking-as-a-service product, either directly to institutional customers, or as a staking button for companies to integrate staking services into their offerings. Both come with integrations with all major wallets and custodians, automated rewards management, industry-leading SLA and a comprehensive monitoring solution, available through a dashboard or an API.
With $700 million assets under stake, accounting for a 2% share of all Ethereum staked, Kiln is the only prominent player that focuses on B2B in Europe. Currently,
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Kiln supports staking of Ethereum, Solana, Tezos, NEAR, Terra, Cosmos zones, with many additional 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 capitalisation. 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 decentralisation.
Institutional interest in and adoption of the cryptocurrency and DeFi space has been on the rise, with products catered to institutions having been launched earlier in 2022 such as Aave Arc. Institutional-focused digital asset custody firms have more than $268bn in assets under custody, which institutions will be looking to put to use through staking.
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.
