BTC-backed USDB stablecoin developer raises $2.3 mln in funding

Bima Labs was founded in April and opened a fundraiser at that time, completing it within three months.

The stable coin USDB created by the company can be issued by providing collateral in the form of tokens of liquid bitcoin stacking and restacking protocols. Bima Labs will accept collateral from multiple blockchains, including Bitcoin and Layer 2 (L2) networks based on it, Solana, and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible networks.

Bitcoin-based liquid stacking tokens (LST) and liquid restacking tokens (LRT) can be obtained from providers such as Lorenzo, Lombard, pStake, Bedrock, Acre, DLC.link, ALEX Labs BTC. USBD can be used for lending, borrowing, exchanging and other purposes in decentralized financial protocols (DeFi), allowing users to earn additional rewards.

USBD is currently running on a test network. According to Bima founder and CEO Siddhartha Sridhar, the asset is scheduled to launch on the mainnet in Q4 this year. Around the same time, the company will launch its own BIMA management token on one of the EVM-compatible networks. The team has yet to finalize the specific network.

Draper Goren Blockchain, Sats Ventures, Luxor Technology, CoreDAO and Halo Capital participated in the seed round, along with angel investors including Ryan Fang of Ankr, Brian Crane of Chorus One, Jeffrey Feng of Sei Labs and the co-founder of Berachain, known by the pseudonym Smokey. The valuation of Bima itself at the end of the round was not disclosed. Investors received token warrants along with equity stakes

The funding will allow Bima to expand its staff, which currently stands at six people, by hiring across all areas, including business development and engineering. Sridhar shared in a comment to The Block that initially Bima was developing a stablecoin in the Ethereum ecosystem based on the EigenLayer restacking protocol, but later decided to switch to Bitcoin. According to him, anything that is realized in Ethereum in 4-5 years can be achieved in Bitcoin in 4-5 months.

He explained that the bitcoin ecosystem has a broader market reach and greater usage in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and as a result, greater potential for higher returns.

Bima joins more than a dozen projects in the bitcoin ecosystem that have raised venture funding this year.

Earlier, analyst Colin Wu revealed ten projects with investment from the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance that could issue their tokens in the second half of the year. Among them were as many as five projects in the bitcoin ecosystem: Babylon, Solv, Zest, StakeStone and Lorenzo.