Decentralized finance (DeFi) firms IntoTheBlock and Trident Digital have merged to form Sentora, joining forces to bring institutional investors onchain.

The new company, helmed by Anthony DeMartino, co-founder of Trident and former head of risk strategies at Coinbase (COIN), is also on track to close a $25 million founding round with New Form Capital leading the investment. Ripple, Tribe Capital, UDHC, Joint Effects also participated in the fundraising round, with further backing from strategic ecosystem investors including Curved Ventures, Flare and Bankai Ventures. While most investors have already closed the investment, two firms will close the process by June, the company told CoinDesk.

The merger comes at a time when DeFi is maturing from its «wild west» beginnings into a blockchain-based financial economy with offerings increasingly catered towards sophisticated investors.

It also underscores the ongoing trend of consolidation within the crypto industry. There were 88 mergers and acquisitions in the first four months of 2025, according to Architect Partners, putting this year on track to surpass the record years of 2022 and 2024.

Sentora combines IntoTheBlock’s track record in DeFi analytics—spanning over $3 billion in institutional deployments—with Trident’s experience structuring liquidity programs and financial products.

The platform aims to provide a one-stop shop for institutional investors, offering yield strategies, compliance, risk management and access to structured products all under one hood.

«The vision is to build all the core primitives that are needed for any institution whether it’s a crypto institution, DAO foundation, traditional finance investor or individual family office, to interact with DeFi in a way that feels intelligent, that feels safe, that feels secure,» Jesus Rodriguez, co-founder of IntoTheBlock and now CTO of Sentora, said in an interview with CoinDesk.

A key roadblock that has hindered asset managers entering DeFi at scale is that the space is getting increasingly complex and fragmented across new chains and protocols, DeMartino explained.

«It shouldn’t be this hard,» he said. «You shouldn’t have to learn about a new chain and learn about a whole bunch of different protocols and understand bridging and different wallets every time you want to go to a new chain.»

What can help bridge this gap and attract even traditional finance firms on-chain, according to DeMartino, is to abstract away from interacting with individual protocols with a single platform that handles all the risk management and liquidity, while keeping transparency about the underlying plumbing.

«DeFi rails are the future of finance, but it’s still a very small market,» he said. DefiLlama data shows that there are less than $130 billion of assets on DeFi protocols, dwarfed by the the multiple trillions of assets under management at the likes of BlackRock and Fidelity Investments.

«We’re building the rails for the next 130 trillion of assets to come onchain,» he said.

Read more: Beyond Incentives: How to Build Durable DeFi

NATIX, a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) focused on mapping data on Solana, shared Tuesday that it is teaming up with taxi service Grab to provide more accurate mapping technologies.

Grab, which is known for its taxi services in southeast Asia but also crowdsources mapping data for its technological mapping arm, will be using its collaboration with NATIX to expand its footprint into the U.S. and Europe.

The partnership consists of the NATIX team using Grab’s hardware and software technologies for mapmaking. “We take care of the data collection side, and we essentially monetize this together,” said Alireza Ghods, the co-founder of NATIX to CoinDesk in an interview. “They’re buying the data that we generate to build their pipeline for the U.S. and for Europe. And on the other side, they’re giving us both their hardware technology as well as the AI technology that basically analyzes the images to build maps and map services like navigation.”

“We’re starting in the markets of the EU and US, where [Grab] is not present. So this is us combined with Grab, going for global expansion,” Ghods added.

DePIN is a blockchain-based system that crowdsources real-world infrastructure, like data collection, and verifies them through decentralized technologies. DePIN projects often appear in the Solana ecosystem thanks to the blockchain’s fast transaction speeds and low transaction costs.

NATIX is a project within Solana’s DePIN ecosystem that enables users to contribute street data and mapping visuals via smartphones. The crowdsourced data is then used to build decentralized maps, which can be leveraged by AI models, especially for autonomous driving and smart city applications. Users are also rewarded NATIX’s native token, $NATIX, for their contributions as a way to incentivize them to participate in the network.

“The reason that we actually did the collaboration is due to the power of DePIN combined with a very well established enterprise grade technology, » said Ghods. “I think it’s one of the few sectors in crypto that really, really makes sense.”

Read more: DePIN 2.0: What the Next Generation of DePINs Is Doing Differently

Florida has withdrawn two bills related to the creation of a state-level strategic bitcoin (BTC) reserve.

House Bill 487 and Senate Bill 550 have been «indefinitely postponed and withdrawn from consideration,» according to the state Senate website. The two bills, which were both filed in February, sought to allow investment of public funds in BTC.

Florida joins numerous other states, such as Wyoming, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, which have seen bills related to BTC investments fail to clear the legislative process, according to Bitcoin Laws. There are a string of other states with outstanding bills, most of which remain in the initial committee phase.

The most advanced state-level process to establishing a BTC reserve was in Arizona, where SB 1025 passed a House vote by 31-25 only to be vetoed by Governor Katie Hobbs. The bill proposed permitting the investment of seized funds into BTC.

There remains the related SB 1373, which would allow up to 10% of Arizona state funds to be allocated into digital assets. This bill has yet to reach a final vote.

Read More: Swiss National Bank Rejects Calls to Add Bitcoin Reserves