A new startup called Ground has just stepped out of stealth with $3.6 million in pre-seed funding and an ambitious goal: make onchain yield accessible to the fintechs that have so far been locked out of it. The round was co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi, two names that carry real weight in institutional crypto circles. And the pedigree behind the project is hard to ignore — Ground’s founder previously co-founded another firm that’s been quietly building tokenised US Treasury products for the institutional market.
- Ground has raised $3.6M pre-seed to help fintechs integrate onchain yield into consumer-facing financial products.
- The round was co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi, signalling serious institutional appetite for onchain yield infrastructure.
- Ground was founded by a co-founder of Superstate, a firm that already tokenises US Treasury products on Ethereum.
- The startup is emerging from stealth, suggesting it already has product foundations in place before going public.
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What Ground Is Actually Building
The core pitch is straightforward, even if the underlying plumbing isn’t. Most fintech companies — your neobanks, your savings apps, your payments platforms — don’t have easy access to the yield opportunities that exist on blockchain rails. The friction is real: regulatory complexity, technical integration challenges, and the reputational sensitivity around anything labelled ‘crypto’ have kept most of them on the sidelines.
Ground wants to be the middleware layer that removes those barriers. By abstracting away the blockchain complexity, the startup aims to let fintech products tap into onchain yield without their end users ever needing to know or care about what’s happening under the hood. It’s the same playbook that’s made infrastructure companies like Plaid or Stripe so valuable — sit invisibly between the product and the complexity, and take a cut for making it easy.
The fact that Ground is emerging from stealth rather than launching raw suggests there’s already meaningful work done here. Stealth exits at the pre-seed stage are increasingly common for founders who want product foundations in place before the scrutiny of public attention. For a former Superstate co-founder, the expectation from investors would be high from day one.
Why Onchain Yield Is Having a Moment
It’s worth stepping back to understand why onchain yield has attracted so much attention — and capital — over the past 18 months. The rise of tokenised real-world assets (RWAs) has been one of the most tangible institutional storylines in crypto. Products that put US Treasuries, money market funds, and other yield-bearing instruments on-chain have grown from a niche experiment to a multi-billion dollar category.
Firms like BlackRock, with its BUIDL tokenised money market fund on Ethereum, and Franklin Templeton with its FOBXX fund have given the space institutional legitimacy. Superstate itself has been a key player in this trend, issuing short-duration US government bond funds via blockchain tokens. That context makes Ground’s timing look deliberate rather than opportunistic — there’s now a credible product layer to build infrastructure on top of.
At the same time, the interest rate environment of the past few years created genuine appetite for yield in places it didn’t previously exist. Savings accounts at traditional banks were paying next to nothing for years. Crypto-native users discovered they could earn meaningfully more through DeFi protocols or tokenised Treasuries. Now fintechs are waking up to the fact that if they don’t find a way to offer competitive yield, their customers might go somewhere else to find it.
Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi: What the Investors Signal
Co-leadership from Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi isn’t just a funding headline — it’s a signal about where serious institutional money thinks crypto infrastructure is heading. Bain Capital Crypto has been building a portfolio focused on infrastructure and foundational protocol layers rather than speculative tokens. ParaFi, meanwhile, has a long track record in DeFi-adjacent investments and deep familiarity with the yield landscape.
Neither firm backs pre-seed rounds lightly. At $3.6 million, this isn’t a massive cheque by any standard, but the co-lead structure suggests both investors competed to get in rather than one dragging the other along. That dynamic typically happens when there’s genuine conviction about a founder — and a Superstate co-founder building in the onchain yield space has obvious appeal for both funds.
The pre-seed size also tells you something about the stage. Ground isn’t yet a company with traction metrics to point to publicly. What it has is a credible thesis, a founder with domain expertise, and the right institutional backers to open doors in enterprise fintech sales. The real test will come at the seed and Series A stages, when the product needs to show it can actually move the needle for fintech partners.
The Bigger Challenge: Getting Fintechs to Commit
The infrastructure play for onchain yield is elegant in theory, but fintech adoption of crypto-native solutions has historically been slower than the builders expected. Compliance teams at regulated fintechs are cautious. Consumer-facing brands are sensitive about association with crypto volatility, even when the underlying product is a boring Treasury bill.
Ground will need to do more than build clean APIs. It’ll need to provide the regulatory scaffolding — clear guidance on how these products fit into existing licensing frameworks, what disclosure requirements look like, how custody is handled — that risk-averse fintech operators actually need before they’ll flip the switch. The companies that have won in this space before, like Fireblocks on the custody side, succeeded largely because they took compliance seriously from the start and made it easy for institutional clients to do the same.
There’s also the question of how onchain yield products perform when market conditions shift. The tokenised Treasury space has flourished in a high-rate environment. If rates fall significantly — as many expect over the next couple of years — the yield advantage over traditional savings products narrows, and so does the pitch. Ground’s long-term value proposition will need to extend beyond rate arbitrage to something more durable: programmability, speed of settlement, global accessibility, or some combination of all three.
A Bet on Infrastructure Over Speculation
What Ground represents, more broadly, is a maturing of the crypto investment thesis. The narrative is shifting from speculative tokens and zero-to-one protocol bets toward genuine financial infrastructure — the picks-and-shovels layer that makes the next generation of products possible. Investors who learned painful lessons during the 2022 crypto implosion are now gravitating toward companies building real utility for real financial products.
Ground is squarely in that mould. If it can execute — and the founder’s track record at Superstate gives reason for cautious optimism — it could end up as the kind of quietly essential piece of plumbing that most end users never hear about but that processes billions in onchain yield behind the scenes. That’s not the most exciting story to tell at a crypto conference, but it might be exactly the right business to build right now.
Source: The Block
