Arcade, a platform that allows users to utilise nonfungible tokens (NFTs) equally loan collateral, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding circular with participation from Pantera Capital.

In a Wednesday proclamation, Arcade said Pantera, Castle Isle Ventures, Franklin Templeton Blockchain Fund, Aureate Tree Asset Management, Eniac Ventures, Protofund, Probably Nothing Uppercase and Lemniscap in addition to angel investors BlockFi CEO Zac Prince and Quantstamp CEO Richard Ma were behind the investment in an endeavor to connect NFT-collateralized lending with the decentralized finance space. The platform is also coming out of a private release with $3.iii million in total loan volume secured on a total of $10 million in assets.

Arcade co-founder Gabe Frank said NFTs account for a meaning portion of the e'er-growing DeFi market, which is currently worth over $250 billion in terms of full value locked. "Yet, the lack of infrastructure in DeFi prevents NFT holders from achieving liquidity on their holdings despite massive market caps," he said.

Arcade'due south LinkedIn page shows at least ten U.S.-based employees, with the company currently hiring for various roles, including a senior software engineer, lead talent specialist and team coordinator. Lauren Stephanian, master at Pantera Capital, said the platform'due south collateralization of NFTs had the potential to incentivize participation from "institutional lenders, high-net-worth individuals, DAOs, companies with NFTs on their residuum sheets and NFT collectors."

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Other platforms take already launched or are in the procedure of launching services to facilitate loans against NFTs, including ETNA Network and Lithuania-based lending platform Drops. In March, lending protocol Teller Finance announced that some of its users would exist able to obtain credit without posting collateral, accessible through special NFTs.