Granary Finance Gets $5M Funding From DeFi Community

Emerging DeFi lending protocol Granary Finance has rustled up more than $5 million of the stablecoin USDC in under two weeks, in a community-driven fundraise demonstrating homegrown decentralized interest persists despite cryptocurrency’s ongoing bear market.

The fundraise is designed to support the development of Granary V2, developed with assistance from the EVM-focused Byte Masons Group.

Granary, which started taking shape more than a year ago, was developed as a DeFi lending alternative to conventional and centralized crypto lenders. Many of those once-powerful entities, including Celsius and Voyager, blew up last year in the debt liquidity crunch that gripped yield-bearing tokens and lenders alike in the first half of 2022.

Developers behind Granary are categorizing the fundraise as a “liquidity generation event” (LGE) intended in part to power the release of the upcoming launch of Granary’s governance token. The governance initiative is designed to power the team’s vision of becoming the “first truly user-centric decentralized lending platform,” Granary told Blockworks in an exclusive statement.

The Granary team initially had a $5 million USDC fundraising goal in mind and had slightly exceeded that goal by the time of publication. The raise, as of early evening ET on Friday, was set to continue into the weekend.

In the statement, the team said that Granary will “take center stage when it comes to frictionless lending experiences in Web3 finance.”

A growing number of decentralized alternatives — including protocols and layer-2 solutions powered by DAOs — have emerged in recent months as crypto natives look for opportunities to participate in grassroot initiatives while high-profile traditional financial institutions have taken a step back from the sector.

The industry’s rough showing in 2022 has been a major contributing factor in slowing the torrent of capital flows from external funding sources, according to crypto traders and other market participants.

A significant contributing factor to Granary meeting its funding goal in short order: the team setting up a number of NFT and DeFi projects with discounted terms on their protocol investments, according to Granary developers and an online outline of the funding process.

That percentage discount on shares purchased in the protocol is contingent on connecting a wallet with an “associated NFT” to Granary’s ecosystem, the team said in the outline.

Granary’s LGE features vesting periods ranging from instant liquidity up to 20 quarters, with yield terms varying accordingly. A bonus is allocated to longer vesting periods.

“It’s clear that our community recognizes the potential of this next-generation DeFi solution,” Granary told Blockworks in its statement.