Thaw Digital Announces First Protocol, Coolwater, to Facilitate Collateral Management of Tokenized Assets

Thaw Digital, a financial technology company, emerged from stealth mode today to announce the launch of its first decentralized credit protocol, Coolwater.

Coolwater provides trust-minimizing smart contract infrastructure to coordinate the terms on which capital can be called, deployed, and managed. While existing decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols allow for the tranching of financed assets’ repayment risk, Coolwater offers composable functionality to ensure that underlying collateral meets prescribed eligibility criteria and portfolio concentration ratios.

Thaw was founded in late 2022 by Tom Meister, who previously co-founded NepFin, a San Francisco-based fintech that was acquired by Zilch, and later served as Zilch’s US COO & General Counsel. Meister previously served as an executive at Funding Circle, a marketplace lender that went public in 2018, and began his career as a finance attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area. Thaw raised a pre-seed round led by C² Ventures with participation by RNR Capital.

“The need for sound, transparent, self-executing collateral management extends beyond crypto. We’ve designed Coolwater not only to promote prudential risk management among DeFi protocols and crypto-native firms, but also as an entry point for traditional institutions to begin realizing the benefits of blockchain and smart contract technologies. This is the first offering at Thaw in our mission to help mitigate risk and broaden adoption for tokenized assets.”

Thaw joins a broader movement supporting the tokenization of real world assets (RWA), but still remains actively involved in the development of institutional markets for crypto-native assets as well. Thaw’s COO & Head of Product, Sumit Rastogi, previously held product leadership roles at Paraspace, an Automated Money Market for NFTs, and nWayPlay, a licensed NFT marketplace. While supporting RWA asset originators to deploy their own Coolwater vaults, Thaw is expected to sponsor its own vault strategy to support liquidity and growth for blockchain-native NFT projects.

Photo by Manda Hansen on Unsplash

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