Lattice

Posted on Dec 14, 2021Read on Mirror.xyz

Investing in xToken

The xToken Mascot

We're excited to announce that we've co-led a $2M round into xToken, alongside their existing investors. xToken is an on-chain asset management platform that offers passive and composable DEFi strategies. Their initial product focused on liquid staking derivatives of popular ERC20 tokens, but they've since expanded into Uniswap V3 LP strategies (and so much more!)

We believe that xToken is on the path to becoming a fully integrated DeFi Protocol that will allow people to leverage their assets in the most liquid and flexible way possible. I've known Michael, xToken's founder and Project Lead, for more than a year and a half and have been blown away by how much the project has grown since then. We're excited to get even more deeply involved in the community.

As DeFi has grown 100x in size over the last two years, it has also grown in complexity. Users can stake popular DeFi tokens like AAVE and KNC to help manage risk and govern those networks, but the staking process is not always straightforward. Users often to have manually claim (and re-stake) staking rewards, and staked tokens tend to be illiquid and not composable. Meanwhile, xToken's staking strategies like xAAVE and xKNC are set-and-forget, auto-compounding solutions that are liquid and composable.

xToken is in the early innings of building an ecosystem around their staking strategies, but we believe that the ultimate output will be a platform that gives people maximum liquidity and flexibility for staked ERC20 tokens. As an example, xToken Lending (launching soon!) will be the only place that users can earn both staking yield and interest from lending out AAVE (while also being able to borrow against it).

xToken's journey has not always been a smooth path - xToken has had a major hack and is still in the process of rebuilding trust in the product. However, the community and team have been incredibly resilient and we believe that this solidarity will provide a meaningful moat for xToken going forward.

We're thrilled to partner with Michael and the xToken team and community on the path to building the next great DeFi Platform.