There’s been a $1.3 trillion elephant sitting quietly in the room for over a decade. Bitcoin. The most valuable digital asset on Earth, yet still treated like a trophy on a shelf, too sacred to touch, too static to move. Until now.
Function, the NYC-based startup formerly known as Ignition, just came out of stealth swinging with a $10M seed round led by Galaxy Digital ($GLXY). The round also brings in firepower from Antalpha ($ANTA) and Mantle Network. And this isn’t just a check-writing ceremony. These aren’t fly-by-night cap table tourists. They’re rolling up their sleeves, contributing governance, liquidity, infrastructure, and institutional muscle.
At the center of it all is CEO Thomas Chen, whose prior run scaling BitGo from $0 to $130B+ in AUC and staked assets wasn’t a fluke, it was the dry run. Chen and team didn’t just show up to build another wrapped BTC protocol. They built ƒBTC (Function BTC), a fully reserved, 1:1 Bitcoin-backed asset engineered for structured yield, omnichain liquidity, and composability across DeFi. The kind of asset that turns passive BTC holdings into productive, capital-efficient war chests. Think less buy-and-hold, more yield-and-move.
Since rebranding in April, Function has clocked $1.5B in Total Value Locked, up from $100M less than a year ago. That’s not growth. That’s detonation. FBTC is now live across Ethereum, Mantle, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Smart Chain, and Optimism, integrated with more than 25 top dApps and 8 major chains. It’s also on the short list for Aave v3 protocol integration. That’s institutional validation, not Web3 vapor.
Security? This thing is built like a digital Fort Knox. Multi-party computation (MPC), threshold signature schemes (TSS), and a Security Council composed of Galaxy, Mantle, Antalpha, and Cobo ensure no single player calls the shots. It’s governance with backbone, not governance theater.
Function isn’t here to pontificate about the future of finance. They’re building it. With this raise, they’ll expand liquidity rails, roll out new risk-hedged BTC derivatives, and bring yield-bearing Bitcoin to corporate treasuries and DeFi allocators who are tired of watching capital collect dust.
