City Protocol has raised $11 million across seed and Pre-A rounds to build infrastructure for issuing and operating structured investment products on blockchain, the company announced August 26.
Dragonfly, Jump Crypto, CMT Digital, Stratified Capital, Adaverse and Mirana participated in the financing. The company is targeting a market where asset managers want to put funds on-chain without rebuilding technical infrastructure for every launch.
We raised $11M in our Seed and Pre-A rounds to bring Structured Products on-chain, democratizing diversified financial access.
Backed by: @dragonfly_xyz @CMT_Digital @StratifiedCap @BitscaleCapital @Adaverse_Acc @mirana @jump_ pic.twitter.com/MOt3LChRpc
— City Protocol (@cityprotocolHQ) August 26, 2026
City Protocol builds reusable infrastructure for structured products
City Protocol has split its system into tokenization, vaults, and issuance and operations. The first converts strategies or asset classes into on-chain products, while the vault layer handles deposits, withdrawals, execution limits, accounting and redemptions through standardized smart contracts.
The third layer manages the product lifecycle, including issuance records, net asset value calculations, rebalancing, reporting, subscriptions and redemptions. Its Venzo platform hosts four strategy vaults covering quantitative hedging, cross-exchange arbitrage, private credit and on-chain yield, with about $30 million in total value locked.
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Can wallet-based portfolios replace the need for managed vaults?
City Protocol’s more interesting expansion may be its planned thematic portfolios, because they change how users interact with investment strategies. Unlike Venzo’s managed vaults, the new portfolios will not pool capital. Assets will remain in users’ wallets while automated systems buy and rebalance the underlying assets in accordance with published rules.
That model could reduce the operational layer between an investor and the assets themselves. It also moves some responsibility back to users as they retain the underlying positions, rather than holding a claim on a managed vault, and must absorb the risks associated with the assets and automated strategy.
Meanwhile, HSBC completed its first blockchain-based issuance of a digitally native structured product, another step in the growing use of tokenization across traditional finance in Hong Kong.
Can regulation push these products to scale?
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce has previously raised questions about whether some crypto vaults could fall under securities laws when operators exercise meaningful managerial control over users’ capital.
For City Protocol, the challenge is bigger than proving that smart contracts can automate issuance and portfolio management. It will need to show that reusable infrastructure can support products that are commercially attractive while fitting the regulatory and operational requirements of the markets it wants to enter.
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