Prominent Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev is set to launch a new decentralized finance (DeFi) “cryptobank” – and could spearhead a USD 15 million investment in the new venture.
Lebedev, whose fortune was estimated at a cool USD 3.1 billion back in 2008 by Forbes, is the former head of the Russain National Reserve Bank, and a stakeholder in conglomerates like Aeroflot, Sberbank and Gazprom. He owns a UK media empire that includes the British newspapers the Evening Standard and the Independent and sold his National Reserve Bank holdings last year.
Per RBC, Lebedev has partnered with the head of the Garantex crypto exchange, Sergey Mendeleev, for the new project, provisionally named InDeFinEco. The mogul told RBC that the project will be based in Switzerland and that funding “will be launched in the next few months,” adding that an initial round of USD 10-15 million would be pumped into the new company.
And Lebedev said he hoped the project would break into the world’s top 10 DeFi projects, claiming that the initial cash boost would be spent on minor development costs and creating a basket of reserves that could be used to launch and underpin a stablecoin.
He stated,
