1/ We’re thrilled to announce that August has raised a $10M Series A to continue bringing institutions on-chain 🎉 The round was led by @dragonfly_xyz with participation from @6thManVentures, @robotventures, @ForesightVen, SCB Ltd, @Maven11Capital, @fintech_io and several high profile angels. Read the full story at @FortuneMagazine fortune.com/crypto/2025/03/0… 2/ With over $7B in monthly volume and $400M in loans originated last year, August provides institutions, protocols, and OTC desks with a comprehensive suite of on-chain financial tools including: smart contract accounts, trade execution algos, borrowing/lending, options and structured products, tri-party collateral management, cross-margining and cross-chain DeFi strategies. 3/ Despite five years of innovation, DeFi is still out of touch with the institutional experience. Collateral is isolated per chain with no cross margining between CeFi and DeFi positions. August’s infrastructure enables portfolio margining across all crypto markets, both cross-chain and off-chain. Institutions can LP into a Uniswap pool on Base, while using this position as collateral to tap into CeFi liquidity directly to hedge the impermanent loss, borrow stables on Arbitrum to trade on Hyperliquid, or write OTC options to generate yield. 4/ Putting on a multi-step position on-chain still takes institutions in the order of hours between approvals and multi-sigs. August abstracts this complexity away and makes it 1-click, with automated post-trade monitoring. 5/ With over $200B in stablecoin market cap, and companies filing to bring equities on-chain - it's only a matter of time before the $30T equities market & $18T OTC derivatives market also get tokenized. August is best positioned to facilitate that wave in the most capital efficient manner. We're excited to continue scaling towards a future that is chain-abstracted, portfolio-margined and 1-click. Onwards 🚀

Today, we are launching @upshift_fi, the first dApp powered by August - democratizing access to institutional yield. August has spent the last 2 years building the leading DeFi brokerage for institutions. As DeFi became more complex to manage for every day users, it is now apparent that the next step change to bring assets on-chain will be using professionally curated vaults. Upshift enables two things: 1. Users get access to products that are otherwise reserved to institutions 2. Asset issuers – stablecoins in particular – can leverage Upshift's composable vault toolkit to offer yield-bearing products to their users. Our mission is to migrate the piping of financial markets on-chain. We aim to build an entire ecosystem on top of August. Upshift is just the start. Yield is the Trojan Horse. Read more below:

August 🤝 @ForesightVen Delighted to partner with the Foresight Team to continue bringing institutions on-chain. Their team gets it. “The potential of the intersection of TradFi capital optimization, DeFi, OTC, and algorithmic swaps in particular, is promising, and we believe the August team has the right zeal to capture more market share. With the United States at the forefront, global sentiment is increasingly favorable towards crypto, presenting a market opportunity that August can leverage with the new funding," Forest Bai, Co-Founder @ Foresight. theblock.co/post/345671/fore…

We're excited to support @august_digital in their raise as they scale the next generation of on-chain financial markets 🚀

Last week, @august_digital announced their Series A, and we are very happy to participate! With on-chain TVL ever-increasing, August is opening the DeFi frontier to institutional investors. 🧵

Institutions have been quietly coming on-chain in size and they're doing so using August. August has processed $7B in monthly volume, originated $400M loans while supporting 13 blockchains, 250 tokens, and 70 protocols. We've been heads down the past two years building August to support seamless on-chain, off-chain, and OTC transactions in one place. A big thank you to our investors, partners, clients and team for all of the hard work over the past two years. We're going to solve one-click DeFi / CeFi trading - and this is just the start of that journey. Trading liquid assets on-chain / off-chain and want a cheaper, cleaner user experience? My DM's are open. Onwards 🚀

Let's skip the fake "humbled" speak this time around. We've spent two years iterating over on-chain, off-chain and distributed system tradeoffs to get to the most elegant on-chain prime brokerage and trade execution platform out there. August has supported $7B monthly volume, originated $400M loans and is deployed on 13 EVM chains. Most importantly, we can deploy to a new chain under 24hrs and integrate new protocols under 2hrs. Immensely grateful to the team, our investors and clients for getting us to this point. We're uniquely positioned for scale. If you like the idea of working on hardcore problems with a rockstar teams we're hiring (DMs open). Onwards 🚀

$7B in monthly volume, $400mm in loans originated and $300mm in TVL 🦾 Bullish @august_digital and @upshift_fi

Proud to be an early investor in August and support two of the most talented people I know in the industry @aya_kantor (former head of institutional coverage at FalconX) and @AElkrief (former PM at LedgerPrime). They are the two best positioned to bring DeFi rails to CeFi institutions. Amazing to see them crush it and continue to grow. $7B in monthly volume already 🔥

Super pumped to be backing August! August is the best way to get institutional players into DeFi because with an on-chain prime brokerage you have more tools to manage portfolio risk, you can access multiple chains from one account and execute cross-chain/assets strategies. The on-chain future is bright!

Bull market is apparently over so we can all go back to farming stables. @AElkrief will speaking at @TheTieIO Innovate Denver about Generating Alpha On-Chain. Come and meet the team there!

AI Agents 💻 Systematic Trading 📊 - let us know if you'll be attending the best event at @EthereumDenver @TheTieIO

While Solana is the home of memecoin trading. ETH and the EVM at large remain the home of DeFi. The infrastructure and tooling is unrivaled. If you're an institution deploying size, you simply cannot operate without @FireblocksHQ and @hexagate_, and other chains don't have pools with enough liquidity to generate competitive yields at scale.

1/ At the Crypto Ball, every attendee had a 'pinch me' moment—operators, OGs, and leaders celebrating with Congress and the incoming Presidential Cabinet. The message? Crypto in the U.S. is here to stay—and grow massively.

Excited to partner with the ultimate fixed-rate 🐐

PARTNERSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT 📢💻🔼 We're teaming up with August Digital to give institutions a new edge in crypto: the ability to borrow against $yBTC, Bitcoin’s safest high-yield LST. By leveraging bilateral OTC lending agreements, institutions can borrow OTC against $yBTC, unlocking access to premium yield opportunities in the market. The State of BTC APYs 🟧 BTC yields are often scarce, diluted, and misleading. Many APYs are inflated with points, foreign tokens, or complex math, promising 40% returns but typically delivering around 1% in BTC alongside community rewards like NFTs or airdrops. Institutions mainly rely on DEX liquidity provision and leverage. With borrowing rates at 5%, they borrow against Bitcoin, use stablecoins for on-lending or arbitrage, and earn up to 9% APY. Quantitative funds may push yields to 20% through advanced trading, but these strategies lack principal protection and risk significant losses in volatile markets. The fact is: safely monetizing Bitcoin without long lock-ups is hard. Unlocking Rare BTC Yield 💎 What if you could add 5-10% BTC APY to your strategy by tapping into institutional-grade OTC lending? This collaboration unlocks the potential of $yBTC, the highest-yield, lowest-risk BTC LST, allowing institutions to borrow against it through bilateral OTC lending agreements via August’s platform. By leveraging $yBTC as collateral, institutions can earn 5-10% APY on their BTC while borrowing against it and on-lending stablecoins, achieving returns similar to quantitative funds with far less risk. 📌 With August’s advanced cross-margin collateralization tools, account structures, and robust risk engine, institutions can confidently borrow against $yBTC, knowing their capital remains secure, transparent, and BTC-principal protected. Accelerating Yield with DeFi Trade Execution 🌪️ The secret behind $yBTC’s yields is Umoja’s trade execution engine (referred to as the “UTE”), enabling parallel execution of multiple yield strategies across DeFi protocols and CEXs. By integrating with August’s DeFi interface, Umoja’s trade execution will vastly expand to support @CurveFinance, @ConvexFinance, @Uniswap, @AerodromeFi, @GMX_IO, @paraswap, @1inch as well as all of their forks on different EVM chains. 🔥⛓️ This is extremely important because it enables Umoja to introduce higher-yield, lower-risk liquid staking tokens for virtually every blue-chip cryptocurrency, including upgraded versions of $yBTC itself. Needless to say, the future of BTC yield is looking bright!!! ☄️😎 Stay tuned for more updates. Turn on all your notifications for @UmojaProtocol and @august_digital.

✔️@august_digital is an on-chain permissioned lending protocol tailored for high-stakes liquidity providers. To do: onboard with August to access loans in USDC, ETH, BTC secured by USR and RLP. Pro tip: leveraged positions with August earn 1.5x more points compared to regular holdings.

Have questions about Gain? Hear it from everyone who made it happen! We’re going to hang out with Gain launch partners @Scroll_ZKP, @LayerZero_Labs, @tulipacapital, @august_digital, & more! Tune in! 📆 Date: 22 Aug, 2024 🕔 Time: 3 PM UTC 📍 x.com/i/spaces/1mnxeADljqaxX Until then, here's a quick refresher on Gain powered by Kelp.