The recent upswings in the cryptocurrency market keep bringing joy to crypto asset investors. There is a noticeable hype within blockchain ecosystems during this period, but the market hype has not yet been seen in the NFT market. Despite this, the NFT lending protocol NFTfi managed to raise $6 million in its latest Series A1 funding round led by Placeholder VC.
Key Statements from the NFTfi Team
Investors in the funding round included Maven 11, Launch Labs Inc, Kahuna Ventures, Brevan Howard, The LAO, Reciprocal, a_capital Ventures, Hash, Bloccelerate, Cypher Capital, and Longhash Ventures. The project announced that this latest funding brings the total capital raised to $15 million. Previously, it had raised $5 million in a Series A round in 2021.
The team plans to use the newly acquired funds to improve their dApp by providing support for manual peer-to-peer loans and to expand the features of their SDK aimed at increasing liquidity on the platform. Additionally, as stated in the project’s announcement, they aim to develop an open settlement layer dedicated to NFT financing.
The team reported that since NFTfi’s launch in 2020, it has facilitated a total loan volume of $534 million and lenders on the platform have earned over $15 million in interest. NFT collections used as collateral on the platform include CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Art Blocks, Autoglyphs, Doodles, Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, Clone X, and Otherdeed.
What’s Happening in the NFT Market?
After the bull market in 2021, a significant slowdown in momentum in the NFT market is noticeable. Factors such as imitation among NFT collections, an increase in the number of blockchain ecosystems, and a decrease in interest towards the Ethereum network are significantly impacting the NFT market.
Despite the recent hype in the GameFi sector making investors happy, the lack of significant developments in this area despite the rise of Bitcoin and Ethereum indicates that Web3 users are still not warm to the NFT market.
