The funding round saw participation from a number of top-tier venture capital companies including KR1, DFG, CMS, DigiStrats, FOMOcraft, Bitscale Capital, PNYX Ventures, CMT Digital, and Faculty Capital, per the announcement release.
The funding amount will be used to develop the lending and borrowing protocol “designed to make DeFi fairer for users.” The platform uses a buyback mechanism that captures value and passes all of the revenue generated by the platform to its community.
In a first of a kind, the protocol undertakes liquidation processes automatically without the need for external liquidators. Hence, it captures all fee income, including interest, flash loan, and liquidation fee income. In other lending protocols, this revenue is usually extracted from the network.
Minterest will use its operating surplus to auto-buy the protocol's native MNT token on-market and then distribute it to its users. This signifies that the protocol users' earnings are supplemented with a portion of the protocol's rewards.
Josh Rogers, Founder and CEO of Minterest said:
Minterest protocol will be audited by highly-esteemed auditors in the industry prior to its early access phase, giving users the confidence required to fully participate.
The platform’s design operates on the principle of flywheel tokenomics building a self-reinforcing cycle of value into the platform. This means the more value is created and captured within the protocol, the more it is passed on to users, improving the total Annual Percentage Yield (APY). This makes it attractive to become a liquidity provider to Minterest, thereby attracting new users and over time, exponentially increasing the overall value of the protocol.