Legendary Investor Tim Draper Leads Bitcoin Lending Protocol Zest’s $3.5 Million Seed Round
"I don't want to just hold BTC – I want to use it!" Tim Draper declared, anticipating the solution offered by Zest protocol for addressing bitcoin's usability issues.
Zest Protocol, a Bitcoin-focused lending protocol based on Stacks, has raised $3.5 million in a seed round led by Draper Associates, the venture capital firm founded by legendary bitcoin investor Tim Draper. Binance Labs, Flow Traders, Trust Machines, and others followed Draper's bet on the significance and impact Zest will have on bitcoin's usability.
The goal of Zest Protocol is to provide an almost native experience for bitcoin holders who seek to utilize their bitcoins in markets through lending or yield-generating activities, such as those enabled by smart contracts in blockchains. Users can fund their accounts using a simple BTC transaction, benefiting from the upcoming SBTC upgrade, which allows for more secure and trustless movement of the base asset across layers.
Tycho Onnasch, the founder of Zest Protocol, emphasized the enabling capabilities of layer 2 initiatives for expanding decentralized finance to Bitcoin. He stated that the upcoming wave of innovation would be driven by second-layer protocols, as "the creation of basic defi primitives such as liquidity pools is not possible on Bitcoin L1."
Draper highlighted the current limitations of the Bitcoin protocol, mentioning that he had attempted several experiments to effectively utilize BTC without success. "I don't want to just hold BTC – I want to use it!" he declared, anticipating the solution offered by Zest protocol for addressing bitcoin's usability issues.
Zest Protocol's lending infrastructure is currently available on the Stacks mainnet and will adapt to the upcoming SBTC upgrade when available.
