Singapore-based Vauld, formerly Bank of Hodlers, a crypto trading and lending service, raises $25M Series A led by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures
Quick Take — Crypto trading and lending platform Vauld has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures.
Context & Ripple Effects
Valar Ventures is running a repeat playbook here. The firm led BlockFi's $18.3M Series A for crypto lending back in 2019, then put its name on Vienna-based brokerage Bitpanda and Singapore robo-advisor Syfe within weeks of each other in late 2020 — and now it leads the Series A for Vauld, the former Bank of Hodlers, which combines trading and lending under one Singapore roof.
The Singapore angle matters: Syfe's round was explicitly framed as a springboard into other Asian markets, and the city-state's crypto trading stack keeps attracting outside capital, from Validus's P2P lending raise to AscendEX's later $50M Series B. Vauld slots into that same corridor as a Western-VC-backed retail platform.
First-order effects
- Vauld gains $25M to scale a combined trading-plus-yield product out of Singapore, with Valar Ventures' imprimatur attached — significant for a platform still carrying its earlier Bank of Hodlers identity.
Second-order effects
- BlockFi, Valar's own 2019 crypto-lending bet, now faces a funded lookalike pursuing the same retail deposit-and-lend model in Asia rather than the US, forcing geography-based differentiation instead of product innovation.
- Singapore's cluster effect compounds: each Western-led round (Syfe, Vauld, and later AscendEX) makes the jurisdiction a default shortlist entry for crypto platforms raising growth capital.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US-branded venture money becomes the validation layer for offshore crypto retail lending platforms, concentrating risk in lightly regulated yield products across multiple jurisdictions at once.
The trend: Peter Thiel-backed Valar Ventures is serially funding crypto trading-and-lending platforms at Series A and B across jurisdictions — BlockFi, Bitpanda, Syfe, and now Vauld — building a distributed portfolio of retail crypto finance.