A startup offering up to 10% interest rates 🤑; Can Solana be the ‘Visa of Crypto’? 🤔; BNPL baller Zilch to launch in Europe🇪🇺

Good Morning FinTech, January 14

Good morning Everyone,

And happy Friday! The week is almost done - you made it! But don’t go into the Netflix & Chill mode just yet as there are 3 really interesting FinTech stories you just cannot ignore. Let’s dive straight into them:

A startup offering up to 10% interest rates 🤑

The funding 💸 Seashell, a startup building an investment app to offer high yields, has raised $6M in a seed funding round.

Khosla Ventures and Kindred Ventures co-led the round, with Coinbase Ventures, Solana Ventures, and the Avalanche Foundation also participating. Individual investors, including billionaire Mark Cuban, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, among others also joined the round.

From Stealth to Wealth 👉 Seashell has emerged from stealth mode with its seed funding announcement, and with fresh capital in hand, the firm plans to launch its investment app in the first half of this year.

Seashell was founded to provide the easiest on-ramp for users to generate high yields, especially when inflation is rising and bank interest rates are below 1%, its CEO said to The Block.

One can remember that the US consumer price inflation hit 7% last month, the highest since 1982. To combat that, Seashell hence promises to offer up to 10% yields. All users have to do is connect their bank accounts and transfer money to the Seashell app.

The USP 🥊 So how exactly the firm is planning to provide 10% yields to its users? Well, the company says that users’ fiat money (=USD) will be converted into stablecoins via a licensed custodian, and those stablecoins will then be deposited into decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to generate high yields. Think about DAI or ETH for that matter.

Companies like Seashell make the future look exciting. Here’s why👇🏼