Nigeria: DeFi company, Stakefair, secures US$670k pre-seed to launch its business

Stakefair, a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) company has launched after securing US$670,000 pre-seed funding. Investors involved in the round include Adaverse, Nestcoin, Kepple Africa Ventures, Canza Finance, Voltron Capital, Echo VC Chain, Timi Aboyeji, Tomiwa Olaosebikan, Peter Kisadha, Saturn Blockchain Ventures, Thrive Africa Syndicate, Nehikhare Igbinijesu, Oluchi Enebeli, and Clement Hugbo.

The funds will be channeled towards building an ecosystem for decentralized and centralized platforms to interact with ease; that is, a DeFi yield generation protocol for users, businesses, and governments.

The company, which underwent beta testing for six months, also rebranded from BetDemand to expand beyond DeFi gaming, incorporating new arms of the expansion

It was founded in 2021 by founded by Akinyemi Akindele, 27, who studied computer science at the University of Ibadan, where he trained as a Web2 software developer.

He says that Stakefair was just meant to be a predictions website that allows users to stake on events using digital currency but he “was triggered by the stories of ruin and regret of the respondents of the user research,” so he “set out to build a financial model to see if ‘no loss’ sports predictions was achievable.”

Stakefair (BetDemand) is a Decentralized Finance (Defi) service that pools together funds — cryptocurrencies in a sport event prize pool, allowing users to predict the outcome of a game, giving out cash rewards to the winners without anyone losing money even if they lost the bet.

Like traditional gaming companies, the outcome of the wager can either be a win or a loss. However, Stakefair’s game-changer is its ‘no-loss’ sports staking offering that encourages individuals to see the platform as a yield generator through their crypto stake.

“We have built much more than the business-to-consumer (B2C) DeFi gaming products, we have also built the DeFi infrastructure that allows other developers to build DeFi apps like ours for use cases such as no-loss staking, treasury management, yield aggregation, wallets and market-making,” said Akindele.

To date, the platform has attracted over 6,000 users from Africa, Europe and North America, and recorded over US$800,000 in user stakes. However, during the testing phase, Stakefair evolved beyond a gaming company.