City Protocol Raises $11M to Bring Structured Investment Strategies On-Chain

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City Protocol has raised $11 million across seed and Pre-A funding rounds, the company said on Wednesday. The money is going toward building out infrastructure for issuing, managing and distributing structured investment products on-chain, a category that has traditionally lived inside banks and asset managers rather than public blockchains.

Seven Backers, Led by Names Already Familiar to the Company

Seven backers are named in the announcement: Dragonfly, Jump Crypto, CMT Digital, Mirana, Bitscale Capital, Adaverse and Stratified Capital. Several are established names in crypto venture investing, with track records in exchanges, market makers and Layer 1 blockchains rather than first-time funds testing the sector. The backing reflects continued investor interest in tokenization startups developing infrastructure for bringing traditional financial products onto blockchain networks.

The raise funds three pieces of infrastructure the company describes as a tokenization layer, a vault layer, and an issuance and operations layer.

• Tokenization layer: Turning a financial strategy, such as a hedged bet or a credit position, into a token that can be issued, tracked and redeemed automatically on a blockchain instead of through a fund administrator.
• Vault layer: City Protocol’s flagship product, Venzo, already runs four strategy vaults built on that infrastructure: quantitative hedging, cross-exchange arbitrage, private credit and on-chain yield.
• Issuance and operations layer: Each vault pools deposits and routes them into a defined strategy, with returns and risk meant to mirror a traditional structured note, but settled and tracked on-chain instead of through a broker.

Four of the Same Backers Already Invested Once Before

The $11 million total also isn’t entirely new money. City Protocol already raised a $7 million seed round in May 2025, backed by CMT Digital, Bitscale Capital, Mirana Ventures, Everest Ventures Group and Jump Crypto.

• Four of those same firms appear again in Wednesday’s announcement, and the company’s own wording, “Seed and Pre-A rounds,” plural, suggests this week’s figure may combine that earlier raise with a newer Pre-A round rather than represent $11 million in fresh capital.
• If that’s the case, the actual new money raised since May 2025 is closer to $4 million than $11 million.
• City Protocol has yet to provide a breakdown of the total, and until it does, the $11 million figure is best read as a cumulative one rather than a fresh injection.

A Pivot From IP Tokenization to Structured Products

The announcement also marks a shift in how the company presents itself. As recently as October 2025, City Protocol was pitching itself around tokenizing intellectual property, framing itself as capital market infrastructure for creators rather than for structured financial products.

That earlier pitch leaned on a team drawn from Animoca, The Sandbox, Dapper Labs, HSBC and LVMH, and used comparisons to entertainment franchises to illustrate the scale of value it hoped to unlock. Four months later, the public framing has moved almost entirely to Venzo’s vaults and structured products, with little mention of the earlier IP-tokenization pitch in this week’s materials.

Repositioning around a product line that is actually generating deposits, rather than one still mostly conceptual, is a common move for early-stage crypto infrastructure firms chasing whichever narrative investors are rewarding at a given moment. The latest web3 fundraising updates also highlight how crypto infrastructure companies are increasingly moving beyond tokenization concepts toward products designed to bring traditional financial strategies on-chain.