Kiln, an Ethereum staking-as-a-service startup, announced the closure of its Series A funding round on Monday, raising €17 million ($17.6 million). It will utilize the proceeds to broaden the current staking product range and infrastructure.
The newest financing round was led by Illuminate Financial with the participation of many cryptos investing entities, including Kraken Ventures, ConsenSys, XBTO and current investors, including 3KVC, SV Angel or Blue Yard Capital.
According to the press release, Kiln is currently holding over $500 million of assets staked under management. The company predicts that the staking demand will dynamically spread in the ecosystem after the Ethereum blockchain moves to a Proof of Stake (PoS).
At this time, only 12.5% of the available ETH supply is staked, whereas the figure for other PoS assets reaches 50-80%. If half of the available Ethereum tokens are staked, the value of this market will exceed $70 billion. Since the 'Merge', Ethereum offers an attractive annualized return of 6-7%.
"I am thrilled to close a robust funding round with such respected investors in the crypto space which will enable us to build out the next generation market standard in staking technology. At Kiln, we believe it is critical to provide enterprise-grade infrastructure to institutional users, that in turn enables our customers to create new opportunities for their users. We thank our existing and new investors for their partnership," Laszlo Szabo, the Co-Founder and CEO at Kiln, said.
"The Kiln team could not be more excited about this next stage of building out a world-class staking stack."
Staking Industry Must Become Institutionalized
The enterprise-grade staking technology provider believes that the staking industry is becoming more institutionalized. As a result, it needs to move beyond validators activity, providing customers with greater security and better risk management.
For Kiln, this means creating special APIs and using independent validators to enable staking with multiple providers. It will allow cryptocurrencies to be staked regardless of where they are stored: on exchanges or in secure self-custody wallets.
"As the industry evolves and the need to integrate multiple staking players proves real, Kiln is in an ideal position to play the aggregator role and accelerate it," the company stated.
Presently, Kiln offers a range of solutions for the staking industry, including four proprietary services: Kiln Connect, Kiln On-Chain, Kiln Dashboard and Kiln Validators.
