Toronto-based digital asset issuance platform Noble has secured $15 million in Series A financing led by San Francisco-based cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm.
The blockchain startup’s round also saw participation from a slew of other Web3 investors, including Polychain, Foresight Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, Toronto’s Informal Systems, and undisclosed angels from Celestia, Skip Protocol, Succinct, and Conduit. It brings Noble’s total funding to $18.3 million.
The collapse of Terra and its Luna stablecoin in 2022 spurred the launch of Noble.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies whose value is pegged to a commodity or fiat currency such as the United States dollar. Noble helps stablecoin issuers go directly to blockchain builders and application developers and distribute their products more efficiently across the Cosmos ecosystem.
Noble said it plans to use this funding to develop products that encourage stablecoin adoption and launch its own stablecoin, the Noble Dollar.
The startup was founded in 2023 by CEO Jelena Djuric, COO and CFO Stefan Coolican, and CTO John Letey. Djuric, who previously worked at Informal Systems, is also the co-founder of crypto advocacy group the Canadian Web3 Council, while Coolican previously served as president and CFO of Toronto-based Ether Capital and director of investment banking at Toronto’s Cormark Securities.
In a blog post, Djuric wrote that the collapse of Cosmos-based Terra and its Luna stablecoin in 2022 spurred the launch of Noble. Terra’s fall shocked the crypto world, helped trigger a prolonged bear market in the sector, and caused a liquidity crisis in Cosmos that hindered its ability to compete with other blockchain ecosystems like Ethereum. “I saw the carnage first hand,” Djuric wrote.
In the aftermath, Djuric wrote that application-specific blockchain (appchain) developers have faced difficulty building scalable businesses given “dried-up stablecoin liquidity, a lack of on and off ramps, and the complexity, cost, and fragmentation of competing custodial bridging solutions.”
“It became clear the status quo for stablecoin routing wouldn’t work in a highly fragmented crypto economy driven by many appchains,” Djuric added. “So … we set out to create a stable, secure and durable asset issuance platform that would make blue chip stablecoin issuers comfortable with the appchain ecosystem.”
Over the past year, Noble claims that it has facilitated over $5 billion in volume and attracted more than $450 million in assets issued by players like Circle, Ondo Finance, Hashnote, and Monerium. Today, the company claims that its platform connects over 50 applications through a single-click workflow.
Feature image courtesy Noble.