Although its roots lie in Bitcoin (BTC) lending, lending platform Ledn has announced the launch of an Ethereum (ETH) yield product after users requested a shielded alternative to manually staking Ethereum.
The Cayman Islands company has added an ETH offering to its Growth Account offering, which currently offers users segregated facilities to earn interest on Bitcoin and U.S. Dollar Coin (USDC) deposits.
An announcement shared with Cointelegraph highlighted users calling for a way to earn interest on their ETH holdings without having to manually stake and manage ETH through a liquid staking pool.
The lending company also noted that its Growth Account is specifically isolated from Ledn’s other products and services. Deposited ETH is only exposed to counterparties that generate revenue from the pledged amount, meaning that if Ledn goes bankrupt, user deposits will not be affected.
Related: Coinbase launches crypto lending platform for U.S. institutions
This is especially important considering the failures of some of the most prominent crypto lending companies in the cryptocurrency industry. Companies such as Celeste, Voyager and Three Arrows Capital highlight the potential pitfalls of overexpansion and questionable lending practices plaguing the industry.
Ledn Chief Strategy Officer Mauricio Di Bartolomeo stated that Ledn users continue to inquire about the ETH product and remain confident that it will become a favorable alternative to self-managed ETH staking:
“This yield option is easier to set up than native ETH staking. Going forward, we are working hard to roll out ETH support across the entire Ledn product suite in the coming months.”
Ledn also announced the launch of a second stablecoin growth account, where users will be able to deposit Tether (USDT) tokens and earn interest starting on October 12. These new products will not be available to users in the United States or Canada.
Ledn is not the only Bitcoin-first company gradually rolling out support for cryptocurrencies other than BTC. Casa is a non-custodial wallet platform that initially only provided Bitcoin services and launched multi-signature ETH self-service storage in June 2023.
In August 2023, Ledn announced a partnership with Cayman Islands real estate company Parallel to enable cryptocurrency users to invest in properties for ultimate residency.
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