OpenTrade launches tokenised treasury bills on Perimeter Protocol
OpenTrade has today launched its lending platform and tokenised treasury bill product.
Founded earlier this year by industry veterans Dave Sutter and Jeff Handler, OpenTrade will focus on bringing institutional-grade lending products to market, including collateralised lending against high quality liquid assets, structured credit, and supply chain finance.
The company is backed by several leading industry venture capital firms including Sino Global Capital, Circle Ventures, Kronos Research, Kyber Ventures, Polygon Ventures, and Outlier Ventures.
OpenTrade’s tokenised treasury bill product leverages the ‘Perimeter Protocol’ open-source code – a protocol that enables companies to provide secure stablecoin lending. It was published as the inaugural white paper from Circle Research which focused on accelerating technical innovation within Web3.
The protocol is built on composable, open-source standards, including ERC-20, ERC-4626, and Verite, and supports a variety of novel on-chain use cases.
The product supports secured lending of USDC against assets like US Treasury Bills, allowing lenders to earn predictable returns while continuing to operate entirely on-chain using their existing wallets and custodians. It is available to individual accredited investors, companies, funds, DAOs, regulated institutions, as well as third party ‘distribution partners’ that can build white label solutions to provide yield products to its end users using USDC.
To support the launch, OpenTrade has established an off-chain operating model including a bankruptcy remote lending structure, a comprehensive legal and regulatory framework, and a network of regulated financial institutions that support the purchase, sale, and custody of the underlying financial assets.
OpenTrade’s off-chain operations are supported by Five Sigma – a UK-based structured finance firm which was spun out of asset manager AGFE by OpenTrade co-founder Biscelgia and advisor Steve White and manages all OpenTrade’s off-chain operations. Five Sigma has retained a fully staffed team of experienced financial professionals dedicated to the project and currently has over $700M USD in assets under management advisory.
OpenTrade is launching with a number of clients and partners that will act as both direct lenders, liquidity providers, and distribution partners powering their own yield products with the OpenTrade platform.
Partners include: Enigma Securities, WOO X, Resonate, Kyber Network, Sino Global Capital, and others. OpenTrade has also announced Zodia Custody as an approved digital asset custodian for OpenTrade products, where Zodia clients will be able to access these products directly within their Zodia platform.
OpenTrade will also be leveraging Zodia Custody’s bank-grade digital asset custody infrastructure for its internal digital asset custody.
“Circle Research is committed to advancing world-class open-source tooling with contributions like Perimeter Protocol, and we are delighted that OpenTrade has chosen to leverage Perimeter’s code for their tokenized Treasury bill product,” commented Rachel Mayer, Circle’s VP of Product.
OpenTrade CEO Dave Sutter added: “OpenTrade is a technological, legal, and operational bridge between traditional financial markets and the digital asset markets. Our launch today is the first step in a long journey towards flatter, smarter, more efficient, and more inclusive financial markets on which entirely new businesses and products can be built.
“Circle Research’s Perimeter Protocol has proven to be a key technological foundation for building a secure, scalable, and composable platform that can support such a journey.”
Meanwhile, Woo Network CEO and founder – Jack Tan – said the partnership with the OpenTrade platform would enable WOO X users to access T-Bills while incurring minimal friction and costs.
“Our primary focus remains on providing our valued customers with a variety of yield products, especially those backed by real-world financial assets with a sustainable source of yield,” he said.
“We look forward to providing our clients with a full suite of RWA yield products using the OpenTrade platform.”
Phillipe Kieffer, CEO at Makor Group, added: “Enigma is thrilled to be a launch partner of OpenTrade, building institutional grade yield products for our customers powered by the OpenTrade platform. We evaluated almost every RWA player in the space and chose to build on OpenTrade. Since Day 1 we’ve been extremely impressed with OpenTrade’s technology, legal and regulatory framework, and off-chain operation”
Rob Montgomery, CEO at Resonate, said his company’s mission was to bring world-class, innovative yield products to the DeFi market.
“Earlier this year we made it a priority to make RWAs part of our strategy and have chosen to partner with OpenTrade to power our T-Bill yield products,” he said.
“We’ve been extremely impressed with their team, technology, legal framework, and operational know-how. We’re very excited to be launching our T-bill yield product powered by OpenTrade later this year.”