Accountable Secures $2.3 Million for Crypto Credit Transformation
Crypto data startup Accountable has raised $2.3 million in seed funding to innovate the undercollateralized crypto credit space. The funding round was led by MitonC and Zee Prime Capital, with support from angel investors such as Darius Rugys from Maven 11 and DCBuilder from the Worldcoin Foundation.
The Accountable team is developing a privacy-focused data platform that offers live verification of borrowers’ assets, liabilities, and trading exposures. Users can connect their custodial, exchange, and other relevant accounts to a dashboard that generates credit risk reports to share with lenders at their discretion.
Borrowers retain control over what data is shared and to whom it is sent.
Accountable was founded in response to the collapse of the centralized crypto credit market in 2022, which saw numerous lending firms, including BlockFi, Celsius, and Genesis, go bankrupt due to overextension and faulty trust models.
Despite the contagion from the failed TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin to the collapse of major entities like FTX, many projects utilizing crypto-native tools remained solvent. Accountable aims to leverage cryptography to facilitate trustless interactions between borrowers and lenders, focusing on rebuilding the undercollateralized lending ecosystem.
In the volatile crypto credit landscape, traditional protocols often require higher collateral than the loan value, leading to liquidations during downturns. Accountable seeks to explore undercollateralized loans, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of a borrower’s solvency.
Accountable’s Chief Technology Officer Ioan Moldovan expressed confidence that advances in cryptography could revolutionize information exchanges, allowing for verifiable data with cryptographic proofs attached.
The business model emphasizes the applicability of cryptography to fairly assess users’ creditworthiness using on-chain data. Unlike existing services like Credora, Accountable requires no API keys or wallet address sharing, enabling a more dynamic assessment.
The demand for crypto-based yields persists despite a stringent bear market that imposed tougher collateral requirements and higher interest rates, curbing growth.
The platform utilizes Zero-Knowledge Transport Layer Security, combining zero-knowledge proofs with web-native security to transmit data securely across blockchains and Web2, along with fully homomorphic encryption and other cryptographic techniques to evaluate creditworthiness.
This approach allows users to construct a comprehensive view of their financial health on the Accountable platform, enabling secure sharing of sensitive financial data with counterparties. Pawlowski emphasized that financial institutions are generally hesitant to disclose their entire business models to enter crypto markets.
Accountable’s technology can be utilized to verify data anytime, allowing exchanges or stablecoin issuers to provide proof of assets and liabilities without revealing actual holdings, which is vital for proof-of-reserve reporting.
CyantArb Group, involved in high-frequency trading, noted the importance of accessing debt without compromising proprietary data, emphasizing that they leverage Accountable’s platform to safeguard trading strategies while ensuring lender confidentiality.
The current iteration of Accountable has been in development for 16 months, initially supported by Maven11 after a previous lending pool with Orthogonal Trading was liquidated post-FTX collapse. Accountable currently employs eight staff members and plans to use the funding to cover salaries while aiming to raise another round in Q2 2025.
> Editor’s note (Dec. 31, 2024 — 14:15 UTC): Updates headline to reflect the startup primarily focuses on off-chain data.
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