TL;DR:
Brix, a startup focused on the tokenization of high-yield assets in emerging markets, completed a $5.5 million funding round to bring some of the most profitable operations in traditional finance to the blockchain. The round included participation from the investment arm of Turkish bank Yapı Kredi, FRWRD, and the asset management subsidiary of İş Bank, İş Asset Management, alongside native crypto investors such as Circle Ventures, ConsenSys and Borderless Capital.
The team, led by Alp Ergin as co-founder and CEO, plans to go public on April 20 with the launch of iTRY, a digital asset backed by money market funds denominated in Turkish lira. The debut will take place through “World Markets“, the platform of MegaETH, Ethereum’s scaling network, a real-time solution with high throughput and low latency.
Brix’s value proposition aims to make its products accessible to a broader range of investors, providing access to operations that have historically been reserved for large international banks. The carry trade in Turkish lira is one of the most compelling examples: with Turkey’s central bank rate hovering around 40%, the available yield has proven attractive to institutional investors but practically out of reach for the general public. Brix packages that exposure into a token that can be traded, used as collateral and integrated into decentralized finance applications.
“Our edge is working with large local financial firms and combining that with years of building new DeFi markets,” Ergin stated.
The project’s architecture relies on partnerships with local financial institutions that originate and manage the underlying assets. Brix handles on-chain distribution and composability. The team noted that it is developing similar products tied to equities, funds and bonds in markets such as the UAE, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil and South Korea.
The launch is also an early test for MegaETH. The network claims tens of thousands of transactions per second and block times below one second, conditions that bring it closer to traditional financial markets than to conventional crypto environments.
Namik Muduroglu, head of strategy at MegaETH, argued that “Brix represents the next frontier, offering retail investors access to yield opportunities in emerging markets that have historically been out of their reach.” According to the Brix team, emerging markets account for approximately 38% of the global economy and 60% of its growth, yet access to their most profitable operations has always been severely limited.
