Just this year alone, we have spoken to 10+ teams building on Moonbeam and there is one consistently recurring theme: Moonbeam attracts some serious talent. Perhaps this is an offshoot of the broader protocol team, who we talk about in a previous post, but something is definitely in the water.
This preamble leads us to Moonwell, a new DeFi protocol we are proud to be leading alongside Hypersphere Ventures, with participation from Katie Haun’s new venture fund, Signum Capital, Robot Ventures & Lemniscap, among others.
Moonwell is a capital markets protocol, unlocking liquidity on the Moonbeam blockchain, allowing users to lend assets, as well as collateralize assets and borrow funds. The protocol is currently live on Moonriver – Moonbeam’s canary network – and currently occupies the highest rank by TVL in the ecosystem of $100M+.
We are fascinated by the potential of robust capital markets on Moonbeam, importantly because of the broader multichain ecosystem within Polkadot. XCM is a native interoperability standard on Polkadot, and will allow for native asset transfers between parachains without any centralization or “rug pull” risk. This will enable assets to flow smoothly intra-parachain, enabling users on any parachain to leverage their assets in the EVM native environment that Moonbeam has built.
Beyond this, we are enamored by the technical & BD chops of the team. They are headed by Luke Youngblood, who led the development of staking & governance infrastructure for Coinbase Cloud. Luke has a unique mix of experience – the engineer hat, capable of delivering and managing complex projects, and the degen hat, with a deep understanding of the DeFi landscape. His counterpart, Lucas Kozinski, is a BD whiz. He previously headed Business Ops at Tokensoft, and is working day and night to onboard partners & liquidity to the protocol.
The Moonbeam ecosystem is early, but this is precisely the point of maximal opportunity. What Moonbeam needs now more than ever are teams like Moonwell to assume a leading role in the ecosystem and attract others to follow in their footsteps.
Moonwell is one serious protocol, and we are excited to see what they will bring to the broader Polkadot ecosystem.
Medium: Moonwell prepares for Moonbeam Launch with $10 million Private Round
Coindesk: Katie Haun’s New Fund Joins $10M Round for Polkadot Lending Protocol Moonwell
