Unlike in traditional finance, it isn’t as easy as letting money sit in a savings account to earn interest on your crypto holdings. In order to see a return in the crypto space, holders have to go through a number of complicated steps to engage programs where they can loan out their crypto to borrowers with interest.
That’s why Blueprint Finance, a crypto startup based in New York, is seeking to make it easier for crypto investors to put their holdings to work. The company announced on Monday that it has raised $9.5 million in a funding round led by Polychain Capital with participation from YZi Labs, formerly Binance Labs, and VanEck.
Blueprint Finance, founded by CEO Nic Roberts-Huntley in 2023, has released two products, called Concrete and Glow, that aim to allow crypto investors to make money on their holdings through the use of decentralized finance, or DeFi. DeFi refers to any financial service, like lending or borrowing, that is conducted on a blockchain and without the involvement of a central bank.
A popular form of DeFi is lending and borrowing, where investors can earn interest on their crypto holdings by lending their crypto out to borrowers in need of short-term capital. The borrowers pledge to provide a return on that loan. In order to ensure that lenders will get their money back, borrowers collateralize the loan with their own crypto. If the value of their collateral falls below a certain threshold, the borrower is automatically liquidated meaning they are forced to repay the loan and their collateral is sold.
Blueprint Finance, and other DeFi companies, seek to eliminate the complexities and maximize the returns that come from these programs with their own products. “The big premise here is, how do we give anybody, institutional down to pure retail, the easiest access and the best utility from their digital assets in terms of return on their capital?,” Roberts-Huntley told Fortune.
Concrete, Blueprint Finance’s first product released in early 2024, is specifically tailored to lending and borrowing on any blockchain that uses the Ethereum virtual machine like Ethereum, Base, and Polygon.
Earlier this year, Blueprint Finance launched its second product called Glow, which is a rebranded and updated version of a Solana blockchain-based lending platform called Jet Protocol which Blueprint Finance acquired in 2024. Glow focuses on allowing investors in the Solana ecosystem to lend, borrow, and trade within one platform.
Concrete and Glow both produce revenue by charging a performance fee when an investor receives a return on their loan as well as fees for managing the lending and borrowing process.
In recent years, the crypto lending market has ballooned into an over $36 billion industry, and numerous companies are trying to capitalize on the growing institutional interest in DeFi services. In 2023, the leading crypto exchange in the U.S. Coinbase, launched a lending program specifically for its institutional customers. There are other popular lending programs available to average retail investors like Morpho and Aave.
Blueprint Finance will spend the money raised in this round on hiring new employees, engineering and marketing, Roberts-Huntley said.
Roberts-Huntley declined to disclose the company’s annual revenue and its valuation in this round. Blueprint Finance previously raised $7.5 million in 2024, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $17 million.
