Crypto Staking startup Kiln has raised €17 million financing round to expand their market-leading staking infrastructure product range.
Kiln is one of the leading enterprise-grade staking technology provider, with over $500 million of assets staked under management.
The latest funding round was led by Illuminate Financial with participation by a number of leading crypto investing groups including Consensys, GSR, Kraken Ventures, Leadblock Partners, Sparkle Ventures, XBTO and renewed participation from existing investors 3KVC, Blue Yard Capital, SV Angel and Alven among others.
Kiln said in a press statement that the staking market is becoming institutionalized and must move beyond running validators to meet the growing customer need to spread risk.
This according to Kiln means creating validator-agnostic APIs and services to enable multi-provider staking. This in turn enables digital assets to be staked wherever they are held, for wallets, custodians, and exchanges.
As the industry evolves and the need to integrate multiple staking players proves real, Kiln sees itself in an ideal position to play the aggregator role and accelerate it.
Following the Ethereum network’s transition to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus (The Merge) in September, which significantly de-risked the protocol roadmap, Kiln predicts the demand for staking ETH to grow exponentially.
Currently, only 12.5% of ETH supply is staked, compared to 50-80% for other PoS assets. Plus, with an annual percentage yield on ETH in the 6-7% range since the Merge, it offers an attractive return-rate for investors.
Staking is the Web3 industry’s native yield: the yield comes from helping secure the blockchain (validating and proposing blocks), and there is no counterparty risk as in lending, or when dealing with a third-party intermediary such as a centralised exchange.
Laszlo Szabo, Kiln Co-Founder & CEO, said: “I am thrilled to close a robust funding round with such respected investors in the crypto space which will enable us to build out the next generation market standard in staking technology.
“We believe it is critical to provide enterprise-grade (staking) infrastructure to institutional users, that in turn enables our customers to create new opportunities for their users.”
Laszlo Szabo, Kiln Co-Founder & CEO
The company plans to use the funding to add new features to Kiln’s industry leading product range.
Kiln said that it already offers the largest product range dedicated to staking on the market with its focus as a technology provider delivering a simple and validator-agnostic staking stack. This includes:
- Kiln Connect, which provides a single SDK to integrate staking, rewards data, and your custodian on all major PoS blockchains
- Kiln On-Chain, which provides smart contracts for seamless ETH staking, any amount of ETH and automated rewards management
- Kiln Dashboard, which provides a 1-click staking dashboard, administration interface, reporting and data exporting
- Kiln Validators, a suite of dedicated or shared validators, with enterprise-grade SLAs, deployed on our multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure
Kiln’s customers include industry-leading companies such as Binance US, GSR and Ledger.
Rezso Szabo, Partner at Illuminate Financial, said: “We are witnessing a once in a generation change that will catalyze the institutionalisation of Digital Assets. Sophisticated users and institutions need enterprise grade infrastructure.
“As a thesis-driven investor backed by traditional financial institutions, we believe the Kiln team has demonstrated they can build key infrastructure that is critical for both digital assets native institutions and will also serve as the future rails for financial services infrastructure,” Rezso added.
Ciaran O’Leary, Co-Founder and General Partner of BlueYard Capital, added: “Staking is going to be one of the core fabrics of the entire crypto industry. Kiln’s robust, scalable and safe solutions provide an important fabric for large pools of capital to participate in the core functioning of crypto networks and to generate novel forms of yield. We are excited that Kiln is at the forefront of this new market.”
Benoît Bosc, GSR Global Head of Product, said: “Having used Kiln’s infrastructure to stake our own treasury and in the future to offer to our clients, our company’s missions are perfectly aligned. We are delighted to be able to participate in the next stage of Kiln’s development and to contribute to making staking easier and more accessible to everyone.”
Kiln has a unique team of globally recognized experts in the areas of SaaS, blockchain infrastructure and smart contracts. The company is led by its three co-founders: CEO Laszlo Szabo, a serial entrepreneur who was previously the co-founder of tech recruitment firm Skill Hunter and has been accelerating Web3 adoption since 2017, CPO Ernest Oppetit, a former product manager at Improbable and Qubit; and COO Thomas de Phuoc, who was previously the Country Lead for France at Circle.
Kiln comprises industry leaders including Duncan Hoffman, VP Revenue, who previously led the EMEA region for Chainalysis as General Manager and scaled the business through years of growth that led to an $8.6B valuation.
Duncan helped establish Chainalysis as the largest SaaS company in the Web3 industry and market-leading solution for cryptocurrency compliance and investigation use cases to help build trust in blockchains.
Kiln has so far raised a total of $21.7 million in funding over 2 rounds. In May, it raised $5 million from Third Kind Managing Partner and Andreessen Horowitz board partner Shana Fisher, SV Angel, Blue Yard, Alven, and Kima Ventures.
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