Frontera Labs, a blockchain development and research firm, has raised a $3 million seed round led by Maven 11 Capital, with Lightspeed Faction joining as a major investor, the company said in a press release Tuesday.
Halo Capital, Heartcore Capital, Anchorage Digital Ventures, Nayt Technologies, Split Capital and a group of angel investors also participated in the round.
Frontera Labs is building Strata, a generalized risk-tranching protocol that packages onchain and off-chain yield strategies into tokenized senior and junior tranches, each with distinct risk-return profiles.
The design aims to give capital allocators more precise risk exposure while improving capital efficiency and scaling the underlying yield strategies.
As decentralized finance (DeFi) shifts from being supply-led to demand-driven, Strata is targeting investors who want risk-optimized yields that better match their mandates.
The team said its model is intended to support a more inclusive and institution-ready yield market by separating risk into tranches rather than forcing all depositors into the same profile.
Originally accelerated by Ethena and backed early by the Ethena Foundation, Strata launched its first structured products on Ethena’s USDe on the Ethereum mainnet in October 2025 and now holds more than $210 million in total value locked (TVL), according to the company.
Its modular, chain-agnostic architecture is designed to expand beyond USDe into a broader range of USD and non-USD assets across multiple ecosystems, including managed yield vaults and real-world asset strategies.
