OpenTrade, an institutional-grade platform for onchain and real-world asset (RWA)-backed lending and stablecoin yield products, raised $17 million in a strategic funding round led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital, the company announced. The capital will support expansion of OpenTrade’s permissioned and permissionless yield infrastructure and growth of its vault-focused service, Curation+, CEO David Sutter said.
Sutter said the company plans to expand its asset management and trading teams, increase engineering capacity, and build a dedicated customer success function to support a growing client base. The raise comes amid debate in the US over how stablecoin rewards should be regulated under the CLARITY Act. Sutter expressed optimism about recent progress on the stalled legislation, which is moving toward a Senate Banking Committee vote after a compromise between crypto and banking stakeholders. The proposed deal would allow usage-based rewards—such as cashback or discounts tied to stablecoin activity—while prohibiting interest-like yield on idle stablecoin balances.
OpenTrade surpassed $200 million in total value locked (TVL) in April. Sutter described the platform’s structure as derived from securities lending in traditional finance, adapted for lending stablecoins, and said the legal architecture was built to offer products globally while maintaining compliance with existing financial and digital-asset regulatory standards. He added there are strong regulatory tailwinds for stablecoins that could support industry growth.
Founded in 2023, OpenTrade provides scalable, compliant yield products for fintechs and institutional investors. Its infrastructure routes deposits into tokenized vaults that allocate capital across a mix of yield sources—primarily RWAs like fixed-income instruments—alongside selected DeFi strategies. Each vault follows a defined allocation strategy and operates via smart contracts that manage deposits, track positions, and distribute returns.
The latest round brings OpenTrade’s total funding to $30 million and included backing from a16z Crypto. The company previously raised $7 million in a strategic round led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital in June 2025 and $4 million in a seed extension in November 2024. OpenTrade also secured earlier funding from investors including Circle Ventures and Polygon Ventures in May 2023 and announced plans to launch a platform for USDC-denominated investments and tokenized financial assets.
Co-founders Dave Sutter and Jeff Handler previously worked at Centre, the now-dissolved consortium of Circle and Coinbase that provided governance standards for the USDC stablecoin.
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