MetaStreet secures $10M for NFT loans in Metaverse

MetaStreet, a metaverse-oriented decentralized interest protocol, has raised a new round of venture funding as the startup prepares its latest product.

The $10 million capital raising — ahead of the launch of what MetaStreet calls “PowerSweep” — brings the company’s one-year funding requirement to $24 million.

The round received participation from existing investors from Dragonfly Capital, Nascent and Ethereal Ventures. New investors include Fintech Collective, DCG, TheLAO, Focus Labs, Mirana Ventures, Metaversal, OpenSea Ventures, Ledgerprime, Meta4 and Flying Falcon.

In an exclusive interview with Blockworks, Conor Moore, co-founder of MetaStreet, said that all the capital raised will go towards product development, marketing and hiring.

“In the past we were only focused on the capital contribution side of the equation, and now we’re expanding our offering to help solve problems directly for borrowers,” Moore said.

Metastreet operates as a capital provider and is the architect behind the infrastructure required to automate the underwriting and execution of fixed-rate, NFT-backed loans.

Its newest product, PowerSweep, fights to increase the purchasing power of NFT traders by allowing them to buy and sell NFTs on margin via Reservoir, a Web3-native NFT order book protocol.

“The integration with MetaStreet basically allows users to make a transaction, but do it with leverage instead of all their own capital,” Moore said. “It’s focused on borrowers and the origination side of the equation.”

Moore said the next iteration of their product would be to improve scale and efficiency on the borrower side.

MetaStreet has facilitated about $40 million in lending volume to date, according to Moore. In fact, the protocol facilitated two of the largest NFT-backed loans of 8.3 million DAI and 8 million DAI respectively.

After launching the vault product, Moore says there is roughly a few million dollars in the vault from users at any given time.

“We are fortunate to be deeply rooted in NFT finance at such a formative period in the life cycle of the metaverse,” said Moore. “This is one of those unique moments in an industry’s growth where everyone who is here today is simply focused on bringing new users into the space, a whole blue ocean of opportunity.”

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