Overstock VC wing Medici Ventures contributed the bulk at $5 million. An early backer of GrainChain with a $2.5 million equity stake in late 2018, Medici had previously agreed to consider purchasing future equity. It now controls 17.65 percent of GrainChain, according to a Medici spokesperson.
GrainChain, a commodities tracing platform that uses smart contracts to open up liquidity for low-income farmers, has raised $8.2 million in its latest funding round, the company announced Friday.
Chief Executive and founder Luis Macias said the money will bolster GrainChain’s burgeoning operations in Mexico, Honduras and the southwest United States.
“This funding is really going to allow us to add to our operations and scale up the levels that we are anticipating, giving us the ability to implement across the entire supply chain,» he said.
Other new backers include Eden Block, according to a press release.
GrainChain envisions itself as a sort of glue between disparate actors in the agriculture supply chain. It brings farmers, bankers, insurers, exporters and trade associations on a unified blockchain platform where they can validate the movement of crops and commodities, and even make payments through event-triggered smart contracts.
In September, part of that vision took form as GrainChain inked deals with stakeholders from across the Honduran coffee industry. This included low-income farmers picking the beans, many of whom struggle to secure loans from bankers weary of supply chain inefficiencies.
Both farmers and bankers expressed hope at the time that GrainChain’s traceability trust factor could change that.
Medici CEO Jonathan Johnson said the VC got on board to help support GrainChain’s efforts to «eliminate middlemen and re-humanize commerce.»
Macias said the platform has attracted interest from more supply chain stakeholders in the time since. “People are excited about the implementation”, he said.
The new funding will also build out GrainChain’s global presence. Macias said he is currently brokering deals in two more countries that he expects to announce later this year.
«We’re pleased to support their continued global expansion.» Medici’s Johnson said of GrainChain.
Paradigm Labs Shuts Down, Says It Was ‘Too Early’ for DeFi Boom
Paradigm Labs is closing down after concluding that interest in decentralized finance (DeFi) came too late in the company’s life cycle.Based in California, Paradigm Labs wanted to develop liquidity solutions for the DeFi space. It had a promising start in 2018 when it raised $1 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by Polychain Capital, with additional placements from Dragonfly Capital and Chapter One.
But in a blog post Tuesday, founder and CEO Liam Kovatch said:»Our team has come to the decision that without significant product-market fit and limited resources to pursue emergent opportunities, the kind of success we envisioned for Paradigm Labs is unlikely.»
Paradigm’s failure to «carve a viable niche in the DEX marketplace» came as a result of a fast-evolving and fluid DeFi space that was difficult for the company to navigate, according to the post.
Its initial project, an orderbook that could be shared between different trading platforms, quickly became «obsolete» as Uniswap and P2P market infrastructure 0x Mesh grew in popularity, Kovatch said.
Although Paradigm had begun to make headway with a 0x-based non-custodial request-for-quotation system known as Zaidan, the company was «constrained by the high-capital requirements,» meaning they couldn’t service trades or «secure the necessary funding» to keep it running.
«The idea for Zaidan … came to us late in the company’s life cycle at which point we were too under resourced to fully develop Zaidan. In general, we believe we were a bit too early,» Kovatch said.
At the time of the seed round, Kovatch told CoinDesk that the company had decided to cap investment at $1 million so the firm could remain «capital efficient and lean.»
With Zaidan already shut down, Kovatch said Paradigm’s 0x staking activities – known as Zaidan’s War Chest – would be gradually wound up, along with the company, over the next month.