Dinero, the recently rebranded Redacted Cartel, has teamed up with Nomura, Japan’s largest investment bank and brokerage group, to launch an institutional fund offering exposure to Ethereum (ETH) staking rewards.
Launched on July 29, the Institutional pxETH (IpxETH) fund is fully backed by Dinero’s liquid staking token, pxETH. Investors can access the fund via a new share class offered by Nomura’s long-only Ethereum fund, which is managed by Laser Digital.
“IpxETH is designed to meet the needs of institutional investors seeking ETH staking yield and to mitigate the perceived risks and complexities typically associated with DeFi and ETH staking,” Dinero said.
“For the first time, accredited participants will have easy access to DeFi’s highest yielding Ethereum staking product through ipxETH — allowing us to onboard a new wave of market participants like [registered investment advisors], brokers, and more.”
Dinero noted that the IpxETH fund was developed in partnership with Laser Digital and Galaxy Digital.
The launch of IpxETH follows spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) entering the market on July 23, opening the door to increased institutional adoption of ETH.
While spot Ether ETFs provide a regulated vehicle for institutions to access exposure to ETH, fund applicants were instructed to remove any provisions pertaining to staking in May.
As such, IpxETH offers a significant point of difference of spot ETFs by providing holders with staking exposure. Dinero and Laser Dinero describe IpxETH as an alternative to spot Ether ETFs.
The fund exclusively serves institutional investors such as hedge funds and private investment firms, rather than retail buyers.
The price of DINERO is down 5.7% in the past 24 hours despite the news, according to CoinGecko.
Dinero Rebrand
The launch comes shortly after Dinero rebranded from Redacted Cartel.
Redacted began life as an OlympusDAO fork in 2021, but abandoned aggressive token inflation in the pursuit of protocol-owned liquidity in favor of a Vote-Escrow mechanism designed to encourage long-term token lock-ups combined with revenue distributions to rlBTRFLY holders during the following year.
The Dinero rebrand was first pitched in May and finalized on July 19. The pivot coincides with the project shifting towards building “full-stack infrastructure for Layer 1 and Layer 2 protocols” through its existing Dinero protocol. Alongside pxETH and its native DINERO token, the project also plans to launch a pxUSD stablecoin and Ethereum transaction relayer.
The project’s token migration from BTRFLY to DINERO went live on July 22, with Dinero describing the move as modernizing its tokenomics.
BTRFLY were converted to the new token at a rate of 2,000 DINERO each. Its previous Vote-Escrow rlBTRFLY staking program and ETH-based revenue distributions were replaced with a simplified DINERO staking mechanism as part of the overhaul.
DINERO staking is subject to a seven-day warm-up period, during which tokens cannot be unstaked or transferred, and after which users are free to unstake.
Staked DINERO also provides three times the voting power of unstaked tokens when participating in governance. The new program also reduced the rate of new token emissions.
