Reflect raises $3.75M to build yield-bearing stablecoin infra on Solana
The raise is led by a16z crypto
Vera Larina/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
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Reflect Money announced today a $3.75 million seed round led by a16z crypto’s CSX accelerator, with participation from Solana Ventures, Equilibrium, BigBrain Holdings and Colosseum.
Reflect won Grand Champion in Colosseum’s 2024 Solana Radar hackathon.
The new capital will fund a “software-as-a-stablecoin” infrastructure that lets any app issue yield-bearing dollars without lockups or operational complexity, the team told Blockworks.
Reflect’s pitch is straightforward: Idle stablecoin balances should be put into productive DeFi yield strategies.
“Every idle asset represents dead capital…which should be earning while you sleep, while you trade, while it sits in your wallet,” Reflect CEO Nico James said.
Reflect protocol tokenizes onchain DeFi strategies — delta-neutral basis trades, lending, etc. — then turns deposited USDC balances into a yield-bearing “USDC+” while remaining fully liquid.
Stablecoins will be non-custodial and be minted and redeemed at will.
Think Morpho white-label vaults meet M^0’s stablecoin-as-a-service. Or just Ethena.
DeFi strategies are executed by smart contracts and are limited to the team’s own curated strategies for now. Curated DeFi strategies will be open to developers subject to governance approval, the team told me.
In short, Reflect empowers any developer to become its own neobank.
As part of risk management, each strategy is backed by an autonomous, onchain insurance liquidity pool.
This “Global Insurance” pool will leverage Jito restaked assets for liquidity, an approach described as akin to FSCS-like insurance for traditional banks.
The insurance pool also allows for slippage-free, MEV-free and feeless rebalancing across strategies.
Reflect is targeting an early-September mainnet launch that will support USDC on Solana.
“Stablecoins are a ~$280 billion market earning zero yield,” James said. “We’re about to change that.”
If it works, “idle dollars” on Solana might become an endangered species.
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