RWA stablecoin issuer Anzen Finance raises $4 million in seed funding

Anzen Finance, a firm issuing the digital dollar USDz, has raised $4 million in seed funding.

Mechanism Capital, Circle Ventures, Frax, Arca, Infinity Ventures, Cherubic Ventures, Palm Drive Ventures, M31 Capital, Kraynos Capital and others participated in the funding round, according to a release shared with The Block.

The seed funding comprises the firm's total funding to date. Anzen's board of directors will not change following the funding round, the firm's founder Ben Shyong told The Block.

Anzen allows users to mint USDz, which is supported by "a diversified portfolio of private credit assets," the company release continues. These cash-flowing RWAs collateralize USDz, and the token can be staked throughout other DeFi protocols. Anzen is live on the Layer 1 Ethereum and the Layer 2 network Base.

The company aims to use the fresh financing to broaden USDz support across blockchains and protocols, broadening the ways users can earn rewards with the token.

"We'll focus on adoption and new use cases for USDz across partner protocols and multiple chains," Shyong said. "This means that Anzen users will have plenty of opportunities with many dApps to earn rewards as a USDz holder. For example on Base, there's a USDz-USDC liquidity pair on Aerodrome where USDz holders can earn Aero incentives."

Aerodome is the top decentralized exchange on Base and the sixth highest-ranking DEX by total value locked, coming in at nearly $726 million, data from DeFiLlama shows.

The rise of RWAs

The market capitalization for RWA-aligned tokens hit $9.05 billion as of 9:52 a.m. ET (13:52 UTC) on May 27, according to the crypto price tracker CoinGecko. The market capitalization grew 64% in the two months since hitting a $5.54 billion market capitalization on March 21.

Ethereum is the most popular chain for RWA tokenization, holding 43.26 billion as of May 24, according to The Block's Data Dashboard. Tron comes in second with $483.4 million held.