As stablecoins like Tether and Circle’s USDC grow in popularity, more companies are rushing to offer their own versions. This includes Ripple, Revolut and Robinhood, which are said to be planning to offer their own version of digital tokens, which are designed to maintain a fixed peg to a fiat currency such as the US dollar.
But as the cryptocurrency landscape gives rise to an increasing number of blockchains and DeFi applications, stablecoin issuers may face difficulty distributing their products across a fragmented landscape. One startup seeking to solve this problem is Noble, an asset issuance platform that just raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Paradigm.
“We are seeing a trend in the broader blockchain space, where a lot of developers or companies want to build their own application chain,” said Jelena Djuric, co-founder and CEO of Noble.
An “appchain” is an application-specific blockchain designed to meet the requirements of a company’s specific needs. New application chains, such as some layer 2 built on Ethereum, are launched every day, making it difficult for stablecoin issuers to release their tokens everywhere.
Djuric said she saw this issue as an opportunity to bridge the gap between stablecoin issuers like Circle and appchain creators by developing a platform that provides increased liquidity.
“We are not a monolithic base layer like Solana, Ethereum, or even Arbitrum,” Djuric said.
“We’re actually a chain with a verification toolkit that’s plugged into 45 or so distinct app chains, which we issue in less than one second of block times.”
Noble acts as an intermediary, working with stablecoin issuers to efficiently distribute their products across 50 different blockchains and providing developers with a seamless user interface to ensure their application chains are compatible with Noble.
Noble has already entered into partnerships with several stablecoin issuers including Circle, Ondo Finance, Hashnote Labs, and Monerium. The company has already attracted more than $458 million in assets.
They will use the funds from this round to accelerate the adoption of stablecoins by developing new user-facing products and expanding their payroll. In total, Noble has raised $18.3 million in funding.