- Liquidium has raised $1.25 million to advance its innovative lending platform that uses Bitcoin Ordinals, with the NFTs acting as collateral for the borrower.
- Sora Ventures, one of the investors, says Liquidium is leading the way in an industry that could explode if Ordinals moves beyond speculation and captures real value and utility.
It’s been the year of Bitcoin Ordinals, with no other trend coming close to the dominance of the major NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain. This wave of adoption has led to the growth of related services, including Ordinal-based lending. Liquidium is a leader in this sector and today announced it has raised $1.25 million for its innovative lending platform.
A variety of investors contributed to the fundraising round, including Sora Ventures, an investor whose portfolio includes AI hedge fund Numerai, gaming technology company Immutable and leading crypto media outlets. Others included Side Door Ventures, Spicy Capital VC, Bitcoin Frontier Fund and ACTAI Ventures.
We are honored to announce the completion of our pre-seed round, raising $1.25 million+.
Many thanks to @ACTAIVentures, @sora_ventures, @BitcoinMagazine, @BTCFrontierFund, @sidedoor_vc, @SpicyCapitalVC, as well as multiple strategic angels for their belief in Bitcoin DeFi. pic.twitter.com/Xgm06m7CnP
— Liquidium | Ordinal DeFi (@LiquidiumFi) December 11, 2023
Bitcoin Ordinals is the brainchild of Casey Rodarmor, a Bitcoin developer who introduced NFTs to the Bitcoin world in January this year. Unlike other NFTs, they are engraved on a satoshi, the smallest value of a Bitcoin. After launching in January, they blew up and by August had topped 21 million.
As its use grows, so do the number of other related services, and lending is one of the most critical. Liquidium allows Ordinals owners to post these as collateral and obtain cash loans. This model is established in Ethereum and other leading NFT platforms, with companies like NFTfi and Blur attracting thousands of users looking to secure funds without having to sell their precious NFTs.
This market is booming, and as of May this year, NFT owners had borrowed more than $375 million, using their NFTs as collateral, according to data from DappRadar.
Liquidium focuses on Bitcoin Ordinals loans
Commenting on why his company took the opportunity to invest in Liquidium, Jason Fang, Managing Partner of Sora Ventures, hinted at the possibility of a Liquidium utility token on the Bitcoin blockchain. He added:
Liquidium fills a huge gap in the market by introducing additional functionality for ordinals, a core element to further increase the value of ordinals use cases. Considering that fungible tokens also come in the form of ordinal numbers, it will be very interesting to see how Liquidium can use this standard to increase their adoption.
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In his comments, Liquidium CEO Robin Obermaier said he aims to create a fair and transparent credit protocol, just as Bitcoin created a fair and transparent financial system.
“Bitcoin opened an era of fair, non-custodial, accessible transactions. Until recently it was limited to basic payments,” he stated, adding:
At Liquidium, we have taken this vision further and created the leading market for fair, non-custodial and accessible lending on Bitcoin, the most secure blockchain in existence.
Despite being a young startup, Liquidium has made more than 300 loans worth more than $870,000, an outlet reports.