The oracle protocol looks to provide pricing data for illiquid non-public assets to DeFi.
Boston, May 26, 2021 -- Lithium Finance, the first decentralized data oracle to price publicly unavailable assets, has raised $5 million in its latest funding rounds.
Lithium's funding round was led by Pantera Capital and Korea-based blockchain VC Hashed. In addition, Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research, Huobi Ventures Blockchain Fund and OKEx’s Blockdream Ventures, along with NGC Ventures, LongHash Ventures and Genesis Block Ventures, are also among the top investors.
The latest round of funding allows the MIT alumni-founded Lithium team to bring years of research on the DMI-mechanism into real blockchain applications. This mechanism can leverage collective decentralized intelligence to provide asset valuation with high accuracy. Such a protocol could widely benefit existing DeFi protocols, traders, and investment analysts.
Lithium Finance is a collective-intelligence pricing oracle. To ensure the protocol will give precise and timely pricing on assets, it rewards analysts who provide truthful information and punish those who offer false pricing data. As a result, Lithium's users will get the pricing for all hard-to-value assets such as pre-IPO stocks, private equity, and other illiquid assets effectively.
Lithium Finance is the third incubation project by Liquefy Labs, a leading DeFi incubator and investment firm in Asia. Lithium Finance will join Linear Finance and Convergence Finance to enrich and complete the Liquefy Labs ecosystem, helping democratize assets and make them available and accessible to everyone.
Franklin Bi, Investor & Director of Portfolio Development of Pantera Capital, said, "One of the most powerful elements of DeFi is that it enables greater price transparency in markets, which ultimately benefits and empowers all participants. We're excited to see Lithium Finance apply cutting-edge research in crowdsourced intelligence and incentives to private, illiquid markets."
Steve Derezinski, Co-Founder of Lithium Finance, said, "Bringing real-world assets into the DeFi space is the final frontier of crypto. However, this can’t be realized without the right pricing oracle, and the market still hasn’t seen one that’s able to price illiquid real-world assets effectively. Lithium Finance will fill that gap and deliver accurate and reliable pricing information from off-chain to on-chain. We are glad that Liquefy Labs shares the same vision, and we look forward to working on it together. "
Adrian Lai, CEO of Liquefy Labs added that "Lithium will be the final piece of the puzzle and the backbone needed to close the gaps between traditional finance and DeFi. Bringing non-public valuation data to make it accessible will be a paradigm shift. It will enable tremendous growth and innovation at Trad-Fi and DeFi's interface and pull the two worlds closer than ever."
