VerifiedX Secures $15M Seed Round for Bitcoin Yield Rails Infrastructure
VerifiedX has closed a $15 million seed round to build infrastructure for Bitcoin yield rails. This is significant, as it highlights investor appetite for institutions to put idle Bitcoin to work without ceding custody.
The funding will be used to expand custody relationships with partners including BitGo, the New York Stock Exchange-listed digital-asset custodian. VerifiedX's programmable financial operating system for Bitcoin, vBTC, and its counterpart on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network, vBTC.b, will benefit from this investment.
vBTC keeps the underlying Bitcoin in a self-custodial address on Bitcoin's own ledger, with deposits and withdrawals authorized by threshold signatures spread across VerifiedX's validators. This design addresses a gap in the market, according to Brian May, a member of the VerifiedX Foundation. 'It's the reason less than 1% of all Bitcoin held by institutions is earning any yield,' he said.