Arcade, a platform that allows users to use nonfungible tokens as collateral for loans, announced Wednesday that it raised $15 million in new funding to expand its team and platform, which is already in private beta.

Investors participating in the Series A round included Pantera Capital, Castle Island Ventures, Franklin Templeton Blockchain Fund, Golden Tree Asset Management, Eniac Ventures, Protofund, Probably Nothing Capital and Lemniscap. Additionally, angel investors Zac Prince, chief executive BlockFi, and Richard Ma, the chief executive of Quantstamp joined as well.

NFTs are assets on blockchains that represent the ownership of digital items such as digital artwork, documents, music, securities and others. As a market, NFTs have risen considerably in value, with the monthly average sale reaching $3,500, according to DappRadar. The locked-in value of the entire market has reached $250 billion, reported DeFiLlama.

“The [decentralized finance] industry currently contains over $200 billion in total locked value, with NFTs accounting for a significant portion of that value,” said Arcade co-founder Gabe Frank. “However, the lack of infrastructure in DeFi prevents NFT holders from achieving liquidity on their holdings despite massive market caps.”

Although it’s in private release, Arcade said it has already facilitated the first on-chain loan of $800,000 for a lender. The company added that it has generated a total of $3.3 million in loans during its private beta secured against $10 million in assets on Arcade.

The platform’s primary audience is institutional investors and high-net-worth collectors. The company provides independent appraisal, validation and curation of NFT collections with the aim to turn otherwise idle assets into revenue-generating entities for these collectors and investors.

Borrowers get the opportunity to make loan requests to set terms such as type of cryptocurrency, loan duration and interest percentage, whereas lenders can make loan requests that are open to actions to give options to borrowers.

The platform is also designed so developers can build on top of it in order to design apps that use Arcade as a DeFi “primitive.” That means that decentralized applications, such as NFT marketplaces, can be made to access Arcade’s platform to allow users within their own platforms to monetize their own NFTs by lending against them.

Image: Arcade