Hedge Labs announces $3.7M Seed Round led by Race Capital

🐣 Summary

We’re very excited to announce the $3.7M seed round of Hedge Labs, initial developer of the Hedge Protocol! The round was led by Race Capital and was joined by other strong investors including Pantera, Solana Ventures, Shima Capital, DCM, AngelDAO, Vinny Lingham, SOLBigBrain, Ben Ling (Bling Capital), Tristan0x (Zeta Markets), Matt & Josh (Origin Protocol), Norbert Bodziony (Synthetify), Alfonso (Crossmint), Andriy (Allbridge), Gaingels and many others.

You can find the press release here.

📖 Story behind Hedge

The idea of offering a 0% interest loan product felt very novel to us — we had never seen anything like this offered in the traditional finance world and it got us really excited to build the first version of Hedge, which we submitted to the Ignition Hackathon. Our submission attracted tons of interest: we won the Chainlink Prize(link) and had close to 6000 vaults created on our devnet smart contract.

We realized we could be building something really big, and we wanted to do it properly, which fueled our decision to fundraise from the best investors in the space. This would help us get the correct strategic partners to ensure the protocol’s success, help us grow faster, and expand our vision.

🛠️ Hedge’s first product

By depositing their SOL, users are able to borrow, for a one time fee of 0.5%, the USH stablecoin interest free at a minimum collateral ratio of 110%. Similar DeFi lending platforms do not offer such a low collateral ratio and will charge fixed or variable interest rates which mean users will have a fluctuating liquidation price. This is not the case with Hedge.

Unlike other stablecoins, USH is always redeemable for its underlying SOL, though a dynamic fee ensures this process happens only as often as required to maintain peg.

Hedge’s liquidation design involves a stability pool where users can preemptively deposit USH to earn HDG tokens as well as instantly liquidate risky positions once they fall below the collateral ratio. This design enables faster liquidations, keeping the system healthy as well as protects USH from large price fluctuation in volatile markets.

We encourage you to learn more about this product by reading our whitepaper and giving us feedback on our Discord!

👀 Vision

Our initial focus is to give users the very best way to unlock their SOL at rates not previously available. We plan to scale by being the go-to place for token liquidity: with the input of the community, we’ll carefully onboard additional forms of collateral. Alongside this, a vibrant ecosystem built on top of USH will be made available — including yield and leverage products — to help users get the most out of their favorite token.

➡️ What’s next

We’ve deployed a newer version of our smart contract on devnet that you can try out at hedge.so — join our Discord to give us feedback! We’re diligently preparing for mainnet and will share more information once we have the details.

🌱 Join us

We’re rapidly growing and looking for people to join our team. We’re based in NYC and Miami but totally open to remote work if you’re based elsewhere. We’re looking for: