Uniswap Labs has secured more funding even as the crypto market struggles and investors start to lose confidence in decentralized finance.
(Bloomberg) — Uniswap Labs has secured more funding even as the crypto market struggles and investors start to lose confidence in decentralized finance.
The exchange, one of the largest decentralized crypto trading platforms by volume alongside Coinbase Global Inc. and Binance, said Thursday it has secured $165 million through a Series B funding round, valuing the company at $1.66 billion. Uniswap said it’s one of the largest funding rounds for a crypto firm since the market downturn earlier this year.
The investment also bucks fading investor confidence in decentralized finance, or DeFi, which has become targets of a series of hacks. Over $718 million has been stolen across 11 DeFi platforms so far this month, according to a research report by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. DeFi users have lost billions of dollars over hacks and manipulative trading activities on such platforms.
Just this week, users on decentralized trading platform Mango lost over $100 million due to a series of transactions by a savvy trader who manipulated token prices on the exchange. That came days after another $568 million hack of Binance Coin. So far this year, $3 billion has been lost in crypto hacks.
DeFi applications like Uniswap are built on blockchains, public digital ledgers of crypto transactions. They enable investors to borrow, lend and trade crypto assets without financial intermediaries like banks. Such applications aim to tackle issues associated with traditional finance such as high transaction costs and censorship.
Uniswap, which is based on the Ethereum blockchain and automates transactions with its protocol, has become a sought-after unicorn since the DeFi boom in the summer of 2020. One of the exchange’s most popular services is yield farming, also known as liquidity harvesting, where users lend crypto to arbitrage different digital tokens or get interest.
Polychain Capital led the latest investment in Uniswap with participation from venture capital giant a16z, Paradigm, SV Angel and Variant, according to a statement from Uniswap’s chief executive Hayden Adams.
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