DeFi Protocol Tranchess Surpasses $1B in Total Value Locked in Two Months

The Tranchess protocol, a chess-themed decentralized finance (DeFi) asset management platform, has been on a tear ever since it made its debut in June.

Evidence of the popularity of the project, which is backed by investment firm Three Arrows Capital, can be found in its total value locked (TVL), which has risen to above $1.1 billion since the launch. TVL refers to the number of assets staked in a given protocol and is a way of determining popularity.

As of press time, the TVL across DeFi protocols exceeded $150 billion, data shows.

Rankings at the DeFi Llama dashboard show that Tranchess has risen from obscurity to 26th on the list in TVL, and it continues to climb the ladder. Two days prior, Tranchess was ranked 38th and is not far behind some better-known projects, including Alpaca Finance, Bancor and Cream Finance.

“The phenomenal growth in TVL shows that investors are keenly attracted to the token system providing varied risk-return solutions,” Tranchess co-founder Danny Chong told CoinDesk. “People of different risk profiles need a safer and simpler way to manage their digital assets.”

Tranchess had been under development for almost a year before it launched on June 24 on the Binance Smart Chain – a network that is designed for budding DeFi apps running smart contracts.

Tranchess’ platform offers such DeFi services as yield farming, staking, leveraged tracking and swapping, and also offers a unique structure of risk/return matrix from a singular primary fund that tracks a specific underlying crypto asset. For the moment, the underlying crypto is bitcoin with more kinds of coins expected to be added in the future.

Last month, the project raised $1.5 million in a seed round of funding that was led by Three Arrows Capital and Spartan Group with participation from other notable investors, including Binance Labs, IMO Ventures and LongHash Ventures.

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