Obex, a new cryptocurrency incubator, has raised $37 million to support building the next generation of yield-generating stablecoins led by Framework Ventures, LayerZero and the Sky ecosystem, the team told CoinDesk in an interview.
The initiative set out to invest in and provide capital to projects that bring real-world asset-backed strategies to the chain, bringing institutional-grade risk controls and underwriting practices to the rapidly evolving sector.
Obex will be the latest capital allocator for Sky, the entity formerly known as MakerDAO behind the DAI and USDS stablecoins with a combined market capitalization of $9 billion, providing funding for projects that grow from the protocol’s vast reserves and earn returns on their strategies.
“While we see stablecoins reaching trillion [dollar market]“I think yield-generating stablecoins are moving even faster,” Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, told CoinDesk in an interview.
Stablecoins, a group of cryptocurrencies that aim to maintain a stable price anchored to an external asset like the US dollar, are a rapidly growing asset class. While they are mostly backed by fiat money and government bonds and increasingly used for cross-border payments, an emerging group of tokens seek to offer a competitive return to their holders through backend investment strategies. Often referred to as synthetic stablecoins, the most notable example is Ethena’s $8 billion USDE token, which generates yield by holding cryptocurrencies in spot while shorting an equal amount of derivatives for a neutral trading position.
However, some backing strategies could prove risky and cause the tokens to lose their supposed price anchor. A number of synthetic stablecoins, including Stream Finance’s USDX and Elixir’s deUSD, recently became unpegged following a DeFi contagion triggered by the Balancer decentralized protocol exploit.
Obex was designed to avoid these stablecoin failures, highlighting the need for more rigorous oversight and better technical foundations, Spencer said. “We can’t let people create $500 million stablecoins and blow them up,” he said. “Sky has the infrastructure to scale them safely.”
The initiative will focus on stablecoins backed by high-quality real-world collateral and will focus on three key areas: compute credits, such as tokenized GPU infrastructure; energy assets such as municipal-scale solar and battery deployments; and loans to large fintechs, which often lack access to lines of credit despite their size.
The incubator will run a 12-week program for early-stage teams, offering capital, technical resources and access to Sky’s infrastructure.
Teams that pass risk and governance reviews can qualify for additional capital from Sky, which recently authorized in a governance vote to deploy up to $2.5 billion in USDS in Obex projects.
Spencer described Obex as a “Y-Combiner for stablecoins,” referring to the influential Silicon Valley startup accelerator. “You look around San Francisco and see stablecoin ads everywhere. We get five to ten proposals every day,” he said. “The energy is there.”
“What’s missing is infrastructure: properly supporting these ideas, ensuring they’re secure, and really bringing them to scale,” he added.
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