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.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been best known for their use in the arts, gaming and collectives, with projects like CryptoPunks, Art Blocks, Axie Infinity and the Bored Ape Yacht Club making headlines as they explode in value.

Now Apollo Capital is investing in a project that uses NFTs in an entirely different method – for finance.

“As NFTs mature, people are going to be finding more use cases for them,” David Angliss says.

Solv Protocol enables people to create, manage and trade financial NFTs on Solv’s own marketplace.

The platform just announced it had finished a $4 million Series A funding round led by Blockchain Capital, Sfermion and gumi Cryptos Capital. Apollo was one of several co-investors in the raise.
 

A trustless solution

Solv is solving a pressing need in DeFi, Angliss says.

Projects typically raise money through token offerings that often have a vesting schedule, where the coins are either locked up in smart contracts that make them untransferrable for a period of time, or simply aren’t initially distributed.

“So you’ve invested in an ICO, in six months time you’ll get your tokens,” Angliss says, referring to an Initial Coin Offering.

So even if an investor had a financial emergency, they’d find it very difficult to access that capital.

“Today, a solution doesn’t exist where you could liquidate that position,” Angliss says.

“You’d have to have just a handshake agreement with someone you know, and they’d have to trust that you send them the tokens once they unlock.”

Solv enables projects to distribute NFTs serve as token vouchers, that unlock the underlying tokens on a vesting schedule. The NFTs can also be bought and sold on Solv’s secondary marketplace.

“That’s quite massive – and that is a more capital efficient way to run an ICO,” Angliss says, referring to an Initial Coin Offering.

“That’s a gap that has existed for quite a while now. I reckon a lot of people would have loved to have the option to sell their position in a ICO or their position in a token before unlocking.”

Solv is introducing an extension to the NFT token standard known as ERC-721, to better fit its NFT token vouchers.
 

Retail token sale upcoming

Apollo had tried to invest in Solv’s seed round, which valued the project at $20 million, but didn’t manage to get an allocation.

The Round A valuation was at US$45 million, and Apollo bought tokens at 50c apiece, Angliss says.

An early token sale for retail investors is coming on December 13 that values Solv at US$70m, or 70c apiece, although there’s a $400 maximum buy-in.

“It’s pretty reasonable, for retail,” says Angliss, who expects there’ll be strong demand for the SOLV tokens.

“We’re pretty excited about this project. It’s like nothing really seen in the market as of yet, combinging NFTs and DeFi.”

Crypto projects could use Solv’s platform to launch in a way that’s more transparent and flexible, Angliss says.

The SOLV token offering (what it calls an IVO, or Initial Voucher Offering) is for vesting vouchers using Solv’s own platform and on Binance NFT.

The vouchers will release tokens lineally over a six-month period, beginning once Solv has its official public sale.

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.

For more crypto news, follow the author on Twitter, Stockhead’s crypto-themed Twitter account, and its Facebook page.

Read MoreCryptocurrency

You might be interested in