Brazilian startup Parfin announced it raised $10 million in its Series A first closing, bringing total funds raised to $38 million. The round was let by ParaFi Capital with participation from Framework Ventures, L4 Venture Builder and Núclea. Núclea is an evolution of Brazil’s Interbank Payments Chamber (CIP) and last year processed 29 billion transactions worth 18 trillion reals ($3.3 trillion). Accenture is an existing backer. Parfin’s Rayls is one of the solutions participating in Brazil’s DREX central bank digital currency (CBDC) trials.
Núclea is one of Parfin’s clients alongside the digital asset arm of the Brazilian Stock Exchange, B3 Digitas and Banco BV.
“Parfin champions a unified finance (UniFi) approach, combining the best of traditional (TradFi) and decentralised (DeFi) finance, which has already helped global financial institutions benefit from blockchain technology,” said Marcos Viriato, Parfin cofounder and CEO. “With this new funding, we can help more banks and financial institutions realise new sources of revenue and stay relevant by leveraging the efficiency, security, and transparency of digital assets.”
Rayls
One of the purposes of the funding, which is expected to expand to $16 million, is to support the ongoing development of Rayls, Parfin’s enterprise grade blockchain solution which launched in June.
Rayls enables financial institutions to create their own permissioned Ethereum compatible ‘subnet’ blockchains, which it calls a Value Exchange Network (VEN). Ethereum technology is natively transparent, so to enable privacy for the bank solution, Rayls uses Zero Knowledge Proofs and Homomorphic Cryptography. Each subnet connects to the Rayls Public Chain where transactions are not private but users are KYC’d.
Banco Central do Brasil is testing Rayls as one of the potential solutions for the DREX wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot. The purpose of DREX is to support tokenization solutions, for which Rayls is designed, but the central bank wants to ensure that transactions are private. It delayed the DREX timeframe because the available privacy solutions are still too immature but progressing.
