OpenTrade

In his retrospective, Dave Sutter said he and Jeff Handler founded OpenTrade in January 2023 after leaving Centre. The initial concept centered on trade and supply-chain finance, but the company first implemented more accessible liquid fixed-income assets, including Treasury bills, before adding trade finance.⁠[1]

The company’s official timeline dates its first production vault to January 2024, moving the stablecoin-to-real-asset yield model into operation.⁠[2]

OpenTrade announced a $4 million seed extension led by AlbionVC. It planned to expand sales, marketing and implementation capacity, onboard clients globally and develop yield products backed by additional asset classes. The release also highlighted WOO X and Littio partnerships.⁠[3]

Notion Capital and Mercury Fund led $7 million in strategic funding, joined by AlbionVC, a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry crypto and CMCC Global. OpenTrade reported more than $11 million raised over roughly six months for product, engineering and operations; that period’s amount was not its eventual lifetime total.⁠[4]

Mercury Fund and Notion Capital led a $17 million round, with a16z Crypto, AlbionVC and CMCC Global participating. Planned uses included permissioned and permissionless infrastructure, Curation+ services, and expanded investment, trading, engineering and customer-success teams.⁠[5]

OpenTrade said it completed a SOC 2 Type 1 attestation in July, issued by Prescient Assurance, covering platform security-control design such as access, data protection, changes and incident response. Type 1 assesses design at a point in time; the longer-period Type 2 examination was still being prepared.⁠[6]

OpenTrade announced Lázaro Campos as chair. Its announcement identified him as a former SWIFT CEO and former Bank of England RTGS/CHAPS board member, also chairing Payoneer Europe and PPRO’s advisory board.⁠[7]

Contemporaneous reporting cited company figures of over $1 billion in trailing-12-month transaction volume, around $300 million in total value locked and $32 million raised. Transaction flows, deposited balances and corporate funding are different measures, all reported for that point in time.⁠[8]

The company lists co-founders Dave Sutter as CEO, Jeff Handler as CCO and Tom Niermann as CTO, with Maxime de Guillebon serving as COO.⁠[2]

The platform supports corporate stablecoin treasuries and in-app yield products. OpenTrade supplies asset access, legal structures and operations, while clients retain their interfaces.⁠[9]

Products include USDC/USDT and EURC money-market-fund vaults, blended credit, Sierra on-chain strategies and hedged SOL staking. Yield sources, risks and redemption terms differ by vault; displayed rates change with market conditions and are not a uniform guaranteed return.⁠[10]

Permissioned vaults on the OpenTrade Protocol restrict access to approved users and whitelisted wallets. Permissionless Sierra vaults support users’ own wallets and transferable tokens. The infrastructure combines APIs, apps, protocol, reporting and operations, available as selected modules or a complete stack.⁠[11]

Curation+ designs and manages vaults around specified yield targets, collateral, risk and redemption terms, including blended real-world and on-chain strategies. OpenTrade identifies Five Sigma Finance as portfolio manager, with investment-committee review before inclusion, ongoing monitoring and rebalancing, and weekly collateral verification.⁠[12]

OpenTrade’s case study describes WOO X integrating Treasury-bill and high-yield corporate-bond products into its existing exchange interface without separate platform onboarding. The corporate-bond vault references the iSharesiSharesiShares is the exchange-traded fund (ETF) brand of the asset manager BlackRock. It grew out of the WEBS country index funds, which began operating in 1996, was run under the iShares name by Barclays Global Investors from 2000, and passed to BlackRock in 2009 when BlackRock acquired Barclays Global Investors. As of September 30, 2026, BlackRock’s ETF assets under management were about $6.36 trillion, with products spanning equities, bonds, commodities and digital assets.Open the full entry 0–5 Year High Yield Corporate Bond ETF, an asset class distinct from Treasury bills.⁠[13]

Littio connects USDC and EURC held in its custodial wallets to OpenTrade for in-app yield and treasury management. A July 2026 case study reported over $250,000 generated for users in an initial four-month period, a historical aggregate rather than a promise for every user or future period.⁠[14]

The company’s risk guide identifies counterparty exposure, exit liquidity, underlying assets and yield sustainability, and smart contracts as evaluation areas. It describes bankruptcy-remote vehicles, independently held collateral and periodic verification as risk controls, while noting that audit history alone does not remove protocol-vulnerability risk.⁠[15]