Publications
- _Building
Since 2022, we have been backing Safe (rebranded "Gnosis Safe"). Meanwhile, the smart contract wallet platform has emerged as critical infrastructure and the most used industry standard for securely managing digital assets in web3. Safe has achieved wide adoption, securing over $100B in assets and being used by major DAOs, institutions, and individuals. This article reiterates our initial investment thesis and showcases our continued conviction in the project, while arguing that Safe features elements of a meta aggregator for web3, putting it in a dominant strategic position.
- _Investments
Greenfield co-leads Centrifuge's $15M Series A. Its unique position in the market for tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs) is due to its solid and efficient infrastructure, differentiated service lines, and stellar team with a strong reputation and network across decentralized finance and traditional players. Centrifuge is primed for further massive growth.
- _Research
Today, >$100B assets are stored in Safes, making Safe the leading platform of smart wallet infrastructure. Safe proved its anti-fragile strength above all in 2023, when it delivered impressive anti-cyclical growth: In its expanding ecosystem (200 projects), a rapidly growing user base (4.1M new accounts) was way more active (18.3M transactions). We documented this success story by analyzing key metrics and major developments in our 2023_Report on Safe. We are publishing this report today amid another decisive moment in Safe's journey: The community vote on token transferability.
- _Investments
We're thrilled to announce that Greenfield is co-leading Keyring's $6M seed funding round alongside Gumi Cryptos Capital. Keyring addresses the crucial challenges of regulatory compliance and market liquidity by empowering financial organizations to engage with compliant counterparts when participating in DeFi. Leveraging zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, Keyring guarantees institutional-grade privacy and security for sensitive data.
- _Investments
We are excited to announce that Greenfield is leading Brahma's latest $2.5M seed-extension round. Brahma has recently unveiled their institutional-grade DeFi management suite for DAOs, DeFi power users, and on-chain funds called "Console".
- _Building
Celo is an EVM-compatible L1 with a special focus on enabling global mobile-first peer-to-peer payments while remaining carbon-negative. As core contributors of the Celo blockchain, cLabs proposed transitioning from a standalone L1 to an Ethereum L2 in July. With this article, we first want to highlight Celo’s mission and values to then understand the aforementioned technical proposal and how it would differentiate Celo from existing L2s.
- _Research
Without transaction privacy, everything on-chain is public. Users expose their information and metadata. Most users don’t want that - especially institutional ones. Nevertheless, it is by no means certain that transaction privacy will become an essential feature of public blockchains. This research effort discusses regulatory and usage challenges and the most promising approaches and protocols to combat them. It covers their basic ideas and trade-offs and suggests a categorization of the current landscape of transaction privacy.
- _Investments
Greenfield is leading the latest $7M funding round for Panoptic. We believe that Panoptic is the next zero-to-one innovation in the DeFi realm. By building on top of Uniswap, Panoptic is not only trying to solve the trillion-dollar on-chain options problem but also enabling an entirely new set of possibilities to create novel financial products. Panoptic allows users to short LP positions and to long or short any on-chain asset via multi-leg options. It can ultimately increase the earnings of liquidity providers which deposit their LP positions into Panoptic to earn additional yield.
- _Investments
We're thrilled to share that Greenfield is leading Stroom's $3.5M seed funding round. Stroom, based in Kiev, Ukraine, stands out with an innovative approach: their liquid staking protocol allows seamless provisioning of channel liquidity in BTC to the Lightning Network and earning fees through yield-bearing DeFi-enabled lnBTC tokens on Ethereum, all without running a node.
- _Research
We at Greenfield believe blockchains and tokenization will transform global capital markets via an emerging internet-native financial system. This research effort is the first in a series to illustrate the motivations, advantages, challenges, and solutions that define the emerging transformation in global on-chain capital markets. We start things off by _1 framing problems in the traditional financial markets on a high level that led to _2 the emergence of public blockchains, the critical advantages of which for capital markets will be laid out. Furthermore, _3 challenges for realizing these advantages will be discussed, while _4 arguing that the space has made significant progress since previous hype cycles.