SEBA Floats Proposal to Become Whitelister for Arc

In an important development, SEBA has come out with the governance proposal requesting to become a whitelister for the institutional lending platform of Aave, the Arc. If the request is approved by the Arc, SEBA will get the role of onboarding the users of the lending platform by fully monitoring their AML compliance and KYC. This association, if it goes through, will definitely become a big step forward for the overall strategy of Aave to target institutional investors in a big manner.  

It is important to note that in the month of July earlier this year, the protocol has made the announcement that it is in the process of developing an institutional platform that works on the permissioned technology. The announcement was met with a mixed bag of responses, and many skeptics expressed their doubts about the protocol’s efforts to divert its energy to build a closed-system protocol. SEBA foresees a strong demand for decentralized finance even in the institutional space, and this might be contrary to the existing viewpoint among the policymakers who are vying for more control over the segment of DeFi and digital assets.  

Just two months back, SEBA Earn was launched by the SEBA. The offering was fully approved by the Swiss Financial market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), and it allows institutional and professional investors to have access to the yields in permissioned DeFi protocols. In the month of August 2019, SEBA, along with the Sygnum AG became the very first two firms that got fully licensed approval by regulators in Switzerland and were designated as the Cryptocurrency banks. 

The proposal floated by the SEBA specifically talks about the interest of institutional clients in accessing the services of leading DeFi protocols, including the Aave. The proposal mentioned that due to the local regulations, many investors had been barred from making deposits in the DeFi applications.