David Angliss, an analyst with Australia’s leading cryptocurrency investment firm, Apollo Capital, shares the fund’s weekly take on what’s happening in the fast-changing and volatile cryptocurrency space.

During the 2017 crypto boom, new projects raised funds through overhyped “initial coin offerings”, developing their own front end, purpose-built interface and smart contracts using Ethereum.

But that fundraising method has fallen out of favour, with projects typically turning to venture capitalists for seed capital or using launchpads frequently dominated by “whales” that require users to hold the launchpad tokens.

Now Aelin, a new under-the-radar project invented by Sydney-based crypto founder Kain Warwick, is aiming to revolutionise the crypto funding space.

“Not many people know about,” David Angliss says. “It’s still quite underground. But essentially what it is, it’s a protocol for deal coordination, built on top of Ethereum” and the scaling solution Optimism.

“So it’s open and permissionless smart contracts, that allow anyone to instigate a pool of capital that can be used to used to source deals from the community ecosystem,” Angliss said.

It’s essentially a decentralised deal-making platform, where deals can be configured however the pool sponsors wants. A pool sponsor would raise money from investors, then try to negotiate a deal on behalf the pool with a new project, for a specified fee. Once a deal is reached, investors would then individually accept it and get project tokens, or reject it and get their money back.

“I’ve heard people call Aelin a decentralised SPAC,” Angliss said, referring to the special-purpose acquisition companies currently in vogue in the United States as a way of raising late-stage growth capital.

 

“It’s closing the gap between individuals that don’t have the development capacity or the dev skills to create code to raise funds. It’s just making the process a lot smoother and easier for anyone or any project or protocol or DAO to raise capital in a decentralised manner.”

When Stockhead checked on Friday, most of the pools seemed to have been set up as tests, but Angliss said that the Synthetix spin-off Kwenta, a derivatives trading platform with zero slippage, would be raising funds on Aelin.

Those staking Aelin governance tokens get a two per cent cut of deals that come to fruition on the platform, as a fee for service.

Apollo has been buying Aelin tokens, although trading volumes are quite low, so the firm is slowly dollar cost-averaging, Angliss said.

“We’re very interested, it fits into our investment theme very well … I haven’t seen anything like this in the market.”
 

Maple Finance acquires Avari

Meanwhile, another Apollo-backed Australian DeFi project, Maple Finance, announced on Thursday it had acquired Solana-based undercollaterialised lending protocol Avari.

Avari’s three team members, Stanford engineers, will join the Maple team to launch the project on Solana this quarter.

“Maple has achieved massive adoption on Ethereum, and we have equally ambitious goals for Maple Solana,” Avari chief executive and co-founder Quinn Barry said in the announcement.

“The combination of the Avari engineering team and Maple’s proven track record is the perfect opportunity to build the highest TVL undercollateralised lending protocol in DeFi. Joining Maple allows us to scale 10x faster.”

“The acquisition of Avari is just an example of a protocol that’s always innovating… this strategic acquisition is a really smart move by Maple, and I expect them to do very well this year, once the market realises they’re at the forefront of institutional decentralised lending and borrowing.”

Angliss said that he and fellow Apollo analyst Matthew Harcourt think that Maple is very undervalued, with  $500 million in total value locked (TVL), but a circulating market cap of just $37.5 million.

The views, information, or opinions expressed in the interview in this article are solely those of the interviewee and do not represent the views of Stockhead.

Stockhead has not provided, endorsed or otherwise assumed responsibility for any financial product advice contained in this article.

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