Polkadot synthetic asset protocol Tapio raises $4 million from Polychain and others

Tapio Protocol raised $4 million in a seed round led by Polychain, Hypersphere and Arrington, in an effort to bring a unified liquidity standard to Polkadot.

Others investors in the round included Spartan, LongHash, 0xVentures, CMS, D1 Ventures, 11-11 DG Partners, Genblock, Valhalla, PAKA, and Double Peak, according to an announcement. 

Tapio is a synthetic asset protocol that aims to promote staking and crowd-loan derivatives efficiency on the blockchain protocol Polkadot — which has a native coin called DOT.

The Tapio Protocol team has identified two core problems with DOT derivatives on Polkadot parachains, according to its announcement — namely, that liquidity is siloed on individual parachains, and each derivative format features challenges for adoption. This fragmentation of liquidity makes the ecosystem less efficient, Tapio Protocol argues, and it aims to put the proceeds of its latest raise towards solving the problem.

In order to unify DOT derivatives into a single asset, Tapio Protocol has come up with tDOT — which can already be found on Acala, a Polkadot DeFi hub. It is backed by a stable swap liquidity pool comprised of both DOT and DOT derivatives.

Polkadot was one of the hotter projects last year, but news surrounding the Ethereum competitor has slowed since then. Nevertheless, development activity on the project remains high, according to its GitHub repository, as relayed by CoinTelegraph.