Nikolas Sargeant
DeFi protocol Renzo announced on Monday, January 15th, that it has raised $3.2M in a seed funding round, with the support of leading crypto native funds.
In a press release shared with Cryptowisser, the team said the funding will be used to help Renzo build out its liquid restaking protocol which recently went live on EigenLayer.
The funding round was led by Maven11 and saw follow-on investments from Figment Capital, SevenX, IOSG and Paper Ventures among others. According to the team, the funding also comes at a time when interest in liquid restaking on EigenLayer is at an all-time high. More than 2,000 users have deposited $20M of ETH (9K ETH) into Renzo since its protocol was deployed in late December.
While commenting on this latest development, Renzo Founding Contributor Lucas Kozinski said:
“It’s a pleasure to welcome so many distinguished investors who share our vision of making restaking accessible to everyone. With their support we will make Renzo the most reliable on/off ramp for Ethereum restaking, building upon the new capabilities offered by EigenLayer.”
Balder Bomans, Founder and Managing Partner at Maven11, added:
“Renzo’s focus on security, risk mitigation and open finance is, in our view, the best way to tackle a liquid and decentralized governance procedure for picking Actively Validated Services (AVS) on Eigenlayer. Renzo delivers risk-adjusted strategies and liquid representations while providing security to restakers.”
Renzo leverages a combination of smart contracts and operator nodes to supply automated liquid restaking strategies on EigenLayer. This method makes it easier to manage liquidity and capitalize on the ability to participate in Ethereum staking while exploring additional restaking opportunities. Renzo enables ETH and Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) to be restaked and utilized as DeFi collateral to earn compounding rewards.
According to the team, Renzo will be governed by a DAO that manages operators, AVS restaking strategies, and protocol parameters. Future releases will introduce support for cross-chain restaking, integration with lending markets, liquidity aggregators and vault products with a focus on institutional on/off ramps.
In addition to this, Renzo uses ezETH, a restaked ETH position that users can mint by depositing LSTs or ETH into the platform’s smart contracts. This fully-backed ERC20 token can in turn be used throughout the DeFi space to generate rewards in ETH, USDC and Actively Validated Services (AVS) tokens, similar to cbETH and rETH.
Renzo is a liquid restaking platform built on EigenLayer that enables users to earn compounding rewards from ETH restaking. By leveraging automated liquid yield strategies, Renzo functions as the perfect on/off ramp for restaking, utilizing a combination of smart contracts and operator nodes to secure optimal risk/reward strategies.
