IntoTheBlock and Trident Land $25M to Crack Institutional DeFi—Wall Street’s Late to the Party Again
Two crypto analytics heavyweights just got a $25 million war chest to bridge TradFi and DeFi. The move signals institutions are finally waking up—albeit fashionably late—to on-chain opportunities.
IntoTheBlock’s machine-learning chops meet Trident’s risk modeling in a merger that could finally give hedge funds a ’safe’ ramp into decentralized finance. Because nothing says ’institutional-grade’ like throwing money at a problem after retail’s already priced in the gains.
The funding round, led by obscure VC firm Digital Horizon, smells like desperation from legacy finance players scrambling for relevance. But hey—better late than never for the suits to realize blockchains aren’t just for drug deals and JPEGs anymore.
Sentora combines IntoTheBlock’s track record in DeFi analytics—spanning over $3 billion in institutional deployments—with Trident’s experience structuring liquidity programs and financial products.
The platform aims to provide a one-stop shop for institutional investors, offering yield strategies, compliance, risk management and access to structured products all under one hood.
"The vision is to build all the CORE primitives that are needed for any institution whether it’s a crypto institution, DAO foundation, traditional finance investor or individual family office, to interact with DeFi in a way that feels intelligent, that feels safe, that feels secure," Jesus Rodriguez, co-founder of IntoTheBlock and now CTO of Sentora, said in an interview with CoinDesk.
A key roadblock that has hindered asset managers entering DeFi at scale is that the space is getting increasingly complex and fragmented across new chains and protocols, DeMartino explained.
"It shouldn’t be this hard," he said. "You shouldn’t have to learn about a new chain and learn about a whole bunch of different protocols and understand bridging and different wallets every time you want to go to a new chain."
What can help bridge this gap and attract even traditional finance firms on-chain, according to DeMartino, is to abstract away from interacting with individual protocols with a single platform that handles all the risk management and liquidity, while keeping transparency about the underlying plumbing.
"DeFi rails are the future of finance, but it’s still a very small market," he said. DefiLlama data shows that there are less than $130 billion of assets on DeFi protocols, dwarfed by the the multiple trillions of assets under management at the likes of BlackRock and Fidelity Investments.
"We’re building the rails for the next 130 trillion of assets to come onchain," he said.
