The round is led by Sino Global Capital, Amber Group and Spartan Group, with participation from Alameda Research, Gate Ventures, Impossible Finance and Shima Capital.
The Pine Platform, which is built on top of the Pine Protocol, enables permissionless instant lending and borrowing of cryptocurrencies using NFTs as collateral. The Pine Platform offers distinctive features to provide a better user experience: The “Pine Now, Pay Later” feature allows anyone to purchase NFTs on open NFT marketplaces with a mortgage, providing flexible financing terms. Currently, OpenSea and LooksRare are supported with more marketplaces to be added. Additionally, NFT owners will be able to keep the utilities of their NFTs, such as receiving airdrops and accessing gated channels, even when they are pledged as collateral.
Since its alpha launch in February and official product launch at the end of April 2022, the Pine Platform has facilitated over $2M in lending. NFT owners can currently get a crypto loan on 30 popular NFT collections including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, CloneX, Moonbird, Doodle and many more.
“A year ago, I wanted to buy a Meebit but did not have spare ETH in my wallet. I sold my Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) at 7 ETH to execute the trade. I wanted to buy back another BAYC but I never did and I still have my Meebit right now. In hindsight I wish I had access to a platform like Pine. I decided to build out Pine so that NFT owners like myself are able to unlock liquidity without having to sell their NFTs. They can also obtain financing for their dream NFT purchases,” says Alex “Azure” Ho, co-founder of Pine. “We are building Pine with a diverse team that comes from different professional backgrounds but most importantly, we are all NFT lovers, collectors, and believers,” adds Alex.
“We believe NFTs have a multi-decade growth runway and will unlock tremendous value for artists, builders, creators, curators and owners. But we are still early, and infrastructure needs to be built out. Pine’s mission to provide DeFi primitives for NFTs will be a critical piece of the puzzle. We are extremely excited to partner with the Pine team and look forward to working with them to accelerate the emergence of an open, inclusive, and flourishing creator economy,” says Wang Jian, Head of Principal Investment of Amber Group.
“Pine is a perfect example of how breakthrough innovation occurs at the intersection of different ideas. By building the infrastructure to facilitate the use of NFTs as collateral, Pine protocol brings needed capital efficiency to the NFT market and is a key step in the continued integration of the NFT and DeFi ecosystems. Sino Global Capital could not be more thrilled to support this amazing team of builders as they push our entire industry forward,” concludes Matthew Graham, CEO of Sino Global Capital.
The funds will be used to further develop the Pine Platform and the Pine Protocol and add multi-chain support for Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche and Fantom, among others.
Connect your wallet to the Pine Platform and get access to instant liquidity: https://pine.loans/
