Haun Ventures leads $32 million round in Ethereum protocol Euler

Katie Haun's Haun Ventures has led a $32 million fundraising round for Euler, a non-custodial protocol that allows users to lend and borrow digital assets. 

Euler, which is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, says it's able to mitigate the risk of lending and borrowing assets through a framework that assigns each investment a tier depending on its risk. 

“Euler takes a unique approach to address the risks associated with lending and borrowing crypto assets that stood out to us as exemplary in DeFi," Haun said in a statement on Tuesday. "These kinds of innovative solutions are particularly important since lending and borrowing protocols serve as a key cornerstone of crypto markets.”

The company says that the round — which also featured participation from Variant, FTX Ventures,  Jump Crypto, and Uniswap Labs Ventures among others — will help it diversify the Euler DAO treasury.

DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, are decentralized structures that give investors the ability to vote on proposals ranging from a protocol's marketing efforts to a new product via a native governance token. Euler says its DAO, which will launch later this year, will give users the ability to vote on Euler's development and operations, and determine how its community treasury is put to use. 

Euler is one of the first investments for Katie Haun, a former federal prosecutor turned investor, since she founded Haun Ventures and raised $1.5 billion for two crypto-focused venture capital funds. Previously, the firm led a $50 million round into NFT marketplace Zora and also invested in crypto tax software TaxBit.