Paris-based Kiln is part of a group of service providers that has garnered investor interest by enabling institutions to tap into staking, a process of temporarily freezing crypto for rewards in return for securing the blockchain.
Kiln believes that the staking market is becoming institutionalized and must move beyond running validators to meet the growing customer need to spread risk. This means creating validator-agnostic APIs and services to enable multi-provider staking. This in turn enables digital assets to be staked wherever they are held, for wallets, custodians, and exchanges. As the industry evolves and the need to integrate multiple staking players proves real, Kiln is in an ideal position to play the aggregator role and accelerate it.
Staking is the Web3 industry’s native yield: the yield comes from helping secure the blockchain (validating and proposing blocks), and there is no counterparty risk as in lending, or when dealing with a third-party intermediary such as a centralised exchange.
Kiln’s team is made up of seasoned experts in the field of SaaS, blockchain infrastructure and smart contracts. The company is led by its three co-founders: CEO Laszlo Szabo, a serial entrepreneur who was previously the co-founder of tech recruitment firm Skill Hunter and has been accelerating Web3 adoption since 2017, CPO Ernest Oppetit, a former product manager at Improbable and Qubit; and COO Thomas de Phuoc, who was previously the Country Lead for France at Circle.
The funding will be used to add new features to Kiln’s industry leading product range.