OpenTrade Completes $17 Million Strategic Financing, Total Funding Exceeds $30 Million
London-based crypto startup OpenTrade has completed a $17 million strategic financing round led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital, with participation from a16z crypto, AlbionVC, and CMCC Global, bringing total funding to over $30 million.
OpenTrade is a platform for institutional-grade on-chain lending and real-world asset (RWA) supported stablecoin yield products. The funds will be used to expand infrastructure between licensed and unlicensed systems, launch a permissionless protocol layer, and develop the Curation+ vault curation framework.
Curation+ leverages regulated asset management oversight to build yield strategies between RWAs and on-chain assets for fintech companies, neobanks, treasury departments, and asset issuers. The company's total value locked (TVL) surpassed $200 million last year, with projected trading volume exceeding $1 billion by the end of 2026 (having already surpassed $250 million in 2025).
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
OpenTrade has focused on institutional-grade RWA and on-chain lending since its inception. This round, led by traditional VCs and crypto funds, continues its positioning in the securitization of real-world assets and the integration with DeFi. Previously, it attracted traditional financial institution funds through regulated pathways, and this round emphasizes the expansion of the Curation+ framework, marking its upgrade from a single lending product to a full-stack yield strategy platform.
In terms of capital pathways, OpenTrade will use the new funds to build a permissionless protocol layer and "position tracking tokens," allowing traditional asset issuers to access decentralized distribution without building their own infrastructure. At the same time, regulated curation lowers the adoption threshold for institutions, aiming to rapidly increase TVL from $200 million to a higher scale and create standardized tools for RWA yield strategies.
Similar to early financing pathways of RWA platforms like Ondo Finance and Centrifuge, as well as Maple Finance's layout in institutional lending, OpenTrade is currently in an accelerated phase of transitioning from early experimentation in the RWA track to institutional-grade hybrid licensed/unlicensed infrastructure.
Essentially, this is a reconstruction of the industry chain: OpenTrade, through Curation+ and position tracking tokens, reconstructs traditional asset management and DeFi vaults into a regulated + decentralized hybrid model, shifting capital from isolated on-chain lending to a seamless yield loop between RWAs and on-chain assets. Mechanically, it reduces institutional entry barriers through regulatory-compliant curation, accelerating the structural shift of real-world capital to on-chain flows.
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What institutions want most is not pure DeFi, but a hybrid channel that is compliant and can access decentralized distribution.
The next stage for RWA is not asset issuance, but helping traditional institutions easily design on-chain yield strategies.
Once TVL exceeds $200 million, financing is no longer about survival, but about making the infrastructure usable at a large scale for institutions.