ZK-powered onchain credit analytics startup Accountable raises $2.3 million seed round

Crypto data startup Accountable has raised $2.3 million in seed funding to transform the undercollateralized crypto credit space. MitonC and Zee Prime Capital led the round, supported by angel investors Darius Rugys from Maven 11 and DCBuilder from the Worldcoin Foundation. 

The team is building a privacy-focused data platform that provides live verification of borrower’s assets, liabilities and trading exposure. Users connect their custodial, exchange and other relevant accounts to a dashboard that can generate credit risk reports to be shared with lenders at their discretion. 

Borrowers maintain control of what data is shared and to whom it is sent. 

Accountable was founded following the collapse of the centralized crypto credit market in 2022, which saw several lending firms including BlockFi, Celsius and Genesis enter bankruptcy. In short, these firms were over-extended and operated on faulty notions of trust. 

Even amid the contagion event that spread from failed algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD to prominent hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and ultimately brought down crypto exchange FTX, many applications built using crypto-native tools were able to stay solvent. 

Accountable, too, is looking to leverage cryptography so that borrowers and lenders can continue to interact trustlessly. But unlike overcollateralized onchain platforms, including MakerDAO, which successfully navigated the market downturn two years ago, Accountable wants to help rebuild the undercollateralized lending ecosystem. 

When it comes to crypto credit, which is strongly impacted by price fluctuations, protocols can require borrowers to put up more capital than their loans are worth, which will automatically be liquidated during a downturn to ensure a degree of security. Undercollateralized loans are also possible but require a more holistic understanding of a borrower’s solvency.

“We believe that new advances in cryptography have the potential to revolutionize information exchanges, as all valuable data will have verifiability levels and cryptographic proofs attached to it in the near future,” Accountable Chief Technology Officer Ioan Moldovan said in a statement. 

Accountable’s business model centers around the idea that cryptography has advanced far enough to assess fairly a user’s creditworthiness using onchain data. However, unlike existing projects like onchain credit rating agency Credora, Accountable users do not need to share their API keys or wallet addresses, which produces a “static” measurement, Accountable CEO Wojtek Pawlowski said.

Pawlowski added that accountable is working on a deal to become a data provider for the software-as-a-service-focused Credora.

There is a “massive retail appetite for crypto-based yields,” but in the aftermath of the bear market, surviving lenders have implemented stringent collateral requirements and higher interest rates, thereby limiting the market. 

The platform leverages the “Zero-Knowledge Transport Layer Security” — a protocol that blends zero-knowledge proofs and the web-native Transport Layer Security to securely transmit data between blockchains and Web2 — as well as  fully-homomorphic encryption and other cryptography to help paint a picture of a user’s creditworthiness. 

Users will be able to create a “comprehensive picture of their financial status” shown on the Accountable platform. This enables them to share confidential financial information with counterparties. Pawlowski noted that financial institutions, in particular, are unlikely to want to disclose (or “open source”) their entire business model just to enter crypto markets. 

Accountable’s tech can be used “any time a piece of data needs to be verified.” For instance, exchanges or stablecoin issuers can theoretically present real-time proof of their assets and liabilities without disclosing their actual holdings to show their solvent in a “proof-of-reserve” report.

“As a group with HFT trading at our core, accessing debt without compromising proprietary data is essential to maintaining our competitive edge,” CyantArb Group said in a statement, adding it is using the platform to safeguard its proprietary trading strategies while maintaining confidentiality with its lenders. 

The firm’s current iteration, which has been under development for the past 16 months, was bootstraped by Maven11 after one of their lending pools with Orthogonal Trading was liquidated after the FTX implosion. Accountable currently has eight employees and intends to use the cash to pay salaries. The company plans to raise another round in Q2 2025.