Binance Labs, the venture capital arm of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, announced that it is investing $10 million in Helio Protocol, a USD-pegged over-collateralised stablecoin.
Helio Protocol will use the proceeds to expand its team, broaden collateral across liquid staking providers, and bolster capabilities for multi-chain proliferation.
The funding comes a month after Helio Protocol acquired Synclub to boost its native decentralised stablecoin, HAY.
Helio said it currently has 11,000 HAY holders with approximately $300 million in total value locked (TVL), a metric used to measure the total value of digital assets that are staked in a particular DeFi platform.
Helio combines over-collateralised, decentralised stablecoin lending and borrowing on BNB Chain with multi-chain StaaS and LSDfi services through its Synclub offerings.
LSDfi is a collection of protocols that revolve around Liquidity Staking Derivatives (LSD) and encompass various aspects of the DeFi ecosystem.
The funding round emphasizes Binance Labs’ efforts to support innovative projects that promote the further development of decentralised finance (DeFi), according to the announcement.
“We have seen tremendous potential in the LSDfi sector, which plays a crucial role in driving the overall growth of the DeFi ecosystem,” said Binance co-founder and Binance Labs head Yi He.
Binance Labs, which has now grown to be worth over $9 billion, has a portfolio that covers 200 projects from over 25 countries across six continents and has a return on investment rate of over 10x.
Early this month, the venture capital investor committed to investing $5 million in the Curve DAO Token (CRV), the token behind the Curve decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Ethereum blockchain.
The Curve DAO Token is the utility token of the Curve DeFi protocol that’s used to exchange stablecoins and other supported tokens along with staking and governance purposes.