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UAE-Based Sheesha Finance DeFi Mutual Fund Raises $9.4M

A Middle East-based decentralized finance (DeFi) mutual fund has raised almost $10 million in just two weeks, highlighting huge demand for these investment vehicles.

On April 13, the United Arab Emirates-based Sheesha Finance DeFi platform announced it had raised a total of $9.44 million. It did so via an innovative initial token distribution mechanism known as a Liquidity Generation Event (LGE).

Contributors in the LGE could claim their liquidity provider tokens in order to stake them for the platform’s SHEESHA tokens. According to the announcement, the LGE allowed micro-investments of as little as 0.0001 ETH. Investors both large and small have lapped it up.

In total, contributors doled out 3,171 ETH, valued at $6.35 million, and 7,769 in Binance Coin (BNB), worth $3.08 million.

A DeFi ETF

Sheesha Finance founder, Saeed Hareb Al Darmaki, cited strong support from the DeFi community:

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“With the strong support of the DeFi community, strategic advisors and partners onboard, we can provide exposure to reputable projects in the DeFi space while offering the best APY options for our ecosystem participants.”

In a blog post in early March, he likened the platform to a “DeFi ETF.” This is because it’s attempting to make DeFi more accessible to mainstream investors.

This is achieved by creating “easily convertible assets.” These assets can then be used to gain exposure to new and existing projects in the DeFi space.

“The finer details are that by staking your LP tokens and staking our native token, you will be earning rewards in the form of our native token, tokens of other existing DeFi projects and upcoming DeFi projects that are due to launch.”

The announcement added that SHEESHA token prices will be decided by a smart contract. It will be based on the staked amount of BNB and ETH plus the available SHEESHA to mint. The team will also form a DAO for decentralized governance.

Each participant will get their proportional LP tokens sent to Uniswap if they provided ETH or PancakeSwap for BNB contributions.

Sheesha NFT drive

There is also an NFT drive from the platform. It will be partnering with reputable digital artists to create crypto art with a hookah theme. The NFT rewards will be distributed to members of the community staking LP and protocol tokens.

The Sheesha Finance advisory board includes some big names in the industry. These include founding partner of Galaxy Digital and CEO of NFT.com, David Namdar, CEO at StakeHound Albert Castellana, industry pioneer Hartej Sawney, and a number of others.