DeFi aggregator Zerion snags $8.2M in Series A

Published at: July 8, 2021

Ethereum-based DeFi aggregator, Zerion, has raised $8.2 million in a Series A funding round.

The non-custodial aggregation platform facilitates access to more than 60 Ethereum-based protocols, such as Aave, Yearn.finance, and Curve. Zerion has processed more than $600 million worth of volume in 2021 so far with a median trade of $1,000.

The raise was led by Mosaic Ventures, and also featured participation from Placeholder, Digital Currency Group, and Blockchain.com Ventures, among others.

Mosaic co-founder and partner, Toby Coppel, and venture partner at Placeholder, Brad Burnham, have joined Zerion’s board of directors as part of the round.

The company has now raised $10.2 million in total, building on its $2 million seed round in December 2019.

Zerion hopes the war chest can help its user base grow from roughly 200,000 to above seven figures. The project plans to expand its team from 18 to 25 before 2022, and revamp its trading interface and portfolio tracking feature.

Zerion is planning to enable support for other popular blockchains and layer-twos that are sufficiently popular among DeFi users during the third quarter. The team estimates its customers open their app nine times daily on average.

Related: DeFi aggregator raided by five hackers on launch day

The decentralized finance sector has exploded in popularity over the past year, with the total number of addresses that have interacted with DeFi protocols increasing from 25,000 to nearly 3 million in 12 months.

Despite DeFi tokens suffering massive drawdowns amid the recent crypto market crash, most of the sector’s leading projects have still gained by multiple factors since the start of the year.

In the past seven days DeFi tokens have surged with Aave (AAVE) up 25.4%, Synthetix (SNX)  increasing 46.4%, Uniswap (UNI) up 16.6% and Compound (COMP) up 29.2%.

Tags
Business
Defi
Funding
Related Posts
Stanford researcher-led Pledge raises $3M for decentralized lending protocol
Decentralized lending protocol Pledge has secured $3 million in investments for its cross-chain ecosystem focused on long-term financing, highlighting continued innovation in the DeFi sector. The investment round was led by DHVC, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm, with additional participation from U.C. Berkeley Professor Gary LaBlanc and Stanford University community members Ray Wong and Torsten Wendl. The raise will support Pledge's mission to become a premier crypto-asset lending platform that eventually paves the way for tokenized real-world financial assets. Pledge was created by a group of blockchain-focused researchers at Stanford University, including Professor David Tse, Nicole Chang, Ray Wong …
Business / Sept. 11, 2021
Tracer DAO raises $4.5M to launch derivatives for anything ‘with an oracle feed’
Decentralized derivatives platform, Tracer DAO, has announced a successful $4.5 million fundraising round to expand its team and product suite. They hope to launch innovative derivatives for “any market with an oracle price feed,” with plans to one day allow ordinary consumers to hedge the cost of commuting and other household bills using tokenized derivatives. This week’s raise saw participation from crypto venture heavyweights, including Framework Ventures, Maven 11, DACM, and Apollo Capital. The investors will share 10% of the project’s governance token supply, which will be vested linearly over two years. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Pat McNab, Tracer DAO founder …
Business / July 1, 2021
Report: ICO Fundraising Plummeted 95% Year-Over-Year in 2019
A report published by research firm CB Insights has found that equity funding has dramatically overtaken initial coin offerings (ICOs) as the dominant means of finance in the blockchain space. While the largely unregulated ICO boom of 2018 raised $7.8 billion, initial coin offering funding fell more than 95% to raise $371 million in 2019. By contrast, equity funding raised $2.8 billion last year. The report also notes the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi), noting that there are currently more than $1 billion in assets on DeFi platforms — up from $300 million as of January 2019. Crypto firms are …
Decentralization / March 23, 2020
Telos raises $8M funding before EVM launch to avoid token sales
Blockchain platform Telos raised $8 million in funding led by ConsenSys and Polygon investor John Lilic. The funding was secured right before the launch of Telos’ Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) platform, ending the company’s ongoing streak of bootstrapped initiatives. Telos aims to redirect the recently secured capital on the platform’s development and marketing in addition to improving the liquidity of the ecosystem “without needing to resort to TLOS token sales in the event of a prolonged bear market over the next year.” According to Telos chief architect Douglas Horn: “While this [bootstrapping] preserved our identity as an egalitarian, self-governing community, …
Adoption / Nov. 9, 2021
Market maker Keyrock closes $72 million in Series B funding round
Digital asset market maker Keyrock has raised $72 million in a Series B round of funding, according to an announcement on Nov. 30. Ripple, SIX Fintech Ventures, and Middlegame Ventures are among the investors in the round. Funds are planned to be used on Keyrock infrastructure development, scalability tools, as well as regulatory licensing across Europe, the United States and Singapore. Keyrock CEO Kevin de Patoul said the company has been focused on a long-term perspective for its business in the past five years. He also noted that: “The new round of funding allows us to expand on that and …
Business / Nov. 30, 2022