Stroom raises $3.5 million

Not many people know about Stroom, but that could soon change. According to our information, the Ukrainian start-up has just raised 3.5 million dollars from several major Web3 players such as the German investment fund, Greenfield Capital, and the American company Ankr.

Stroom is a rather special animal in Web3 since the start-up, which will be celebrating its 2nd birthday in September, does liquidity staking on the Lightning Network (read our Lightning dossier) in two stages: first by placing bitcoins in the LN, then by transforming them into wrapped bitcoin (lnBTC), i.e. bitcoins compatible with the ERC-20 token standard, to seek yield in other protocols such as Ethereum.

"This system allows us to do double duty, both on the Lightning Network and in decentralised finance", explains Rostyslav Shvets, who is the co-founder and CEO of the company (12 employees).

The principle of liquidity staking is to make your cryptocurrencies available on the network, in exchange for a fee. As we explained last week, one of the Lightning Network's big challenges is to benefit from more liquidity. And from that point of view, start-ups like Stroom could change the game.

With this funding, Stroom aims to finish developing its test version by the end of October, and launch its product in early 2024. The start-up will, of course, take a fee for managing bitcoins on the Lightning Network. "We hope to serve between 2% and 6% annual return," explains Rostyslav Shvets. Stay tuned!