Smart money protocol Umoja has successfully closed a $2 million extension to its initial seed funding round, bringing the total amount raised to $4 million.

Umoja aims to use the funds to democratize access to its smart money protocol, which offers automated investment strategies enabling tokens to self-trade, hedge against market volatility and optimize yield.

By accessing tokenized strategies, or “Synths,” in the Umoja decentralized application, users can create financial instruments, such as delta-neutral stablecoins similar to Ethena’s USDe synthetic dollar, and hedged assets, like zero-downside Ether (ETH) contracts, according to a March 19 press release shared with Cointelegraph.

Umoja’s emergence marks the pivotal convergence of traditional finance and decentralized finance, according to Umoja CEO Robby Greenfield, who is the former head of social impact at Consensys. Greenfield wrote:

“Bitcoin opened the door to accessible money; Umoja is now paving the way for accessible wealth creation by making asset management as simple as holding the asset itself.”

The seed round was backed by prominent crypto firms, including Coinbase, 500 Global, Quantstamp, Blockchain Founders Fund, Orange DAO, Hyperithm, Psalion and the Blizzard Fund by Avalanche.

Using the newly raised capital, Umoja aims to tackle the so-called “ROI Paywall” issue, where over eight billion people lack access to wealth creation tools. Despite holding an over $7.2 trillion market share, retail investors are often sidelined by institutions and have no access to data-backed, digital investment strategies, according to Umoja’s announcement.

The firm said the smart money protocol aims to help retail investors capitalize on Bitcoin’s (BTC) bullish upside momentum. The closing of the funding round was announced 31 days before Bitcoin’s much-anticipated halving event, during a time of increased investor interest in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin breached the $71,000 mark for the first time on March 11, three days after Ether breached the $4,000 mark for the first time since December 2021.

Despite Bitcoin’s bullish price action, analysts expect a potential pre-halving correction, based on historical chart patterns, that would fall in line with the 20% pre-halving correction in 2020 and the 38% retracement before the 2016 halving, according to pseudonymous analyst Rekt Capital.

Bolstering investor interest, Grayscale filed to register a new “mini” version of its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust exchange-traded fund on March 11, the same day Bitcoin breached a new record high.

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