The investment round was led by ParaFi Capital alongside Defiance Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Blockchain Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, OKEx, StarkWare and Longhsh Ventures. Angel investors from Synthetix, Aave and Enzyme also participated.
DeversiFi, an Ethereum-based layer-two decentralized finance platform, has secured $5 million in strategic investments from some of crypto’s biggest venture capital firms, sending a strong signal that demand for DeFi opportunities remains strong.
DeversiFi intends to make DeFi trading more accessible, allowing users to invest, trade and send tokens without having to pay gas fees. The platform announced its DVF governance token on March 25 with a fixed supply of 100 million. The decentralized exchange relaunched as DeversiFi 2.0 in June 2020, incorporating the Starkware kSTARK layer-two scaling technology.
Will Harborne, DeversiFi’s co-founder, described the importance of layer-two scaling for Ethereum:
“Layer 2 scaling is essential to Ethereum’s roadmap. We are creating a hub to invest, swap, send, and lend tokens without the friction and cost of Layer 1. As more users onboard we see integrations with centralised exchanges as being important to lower the barriers to accessing L2 DeFi.”
“DeversiFi brings to life a high performance DeFi trading experience without paying high gas fees,” said Santiago Santos, partner at ParaFi Capital. “Ethereum and DeFi are graduating from dial-up to broadband with L2s this year and DeversiFi is at the forefront of this transition that, ultimately, realizes the promise of why DeFi will eat CeFi: faster, better, and cheaper.”
DeFi continues to attract large investment flows and users from around the world. The industry peaked earlier this month as the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols exceeded $163 billion, according to industry data. At the time of publication, DeFi’s TVL was $143.5 billion.
The DeFi boom has continued even as major crypto markets sold off over the weekend. At the time of writing, most major DeFi tokens had reported gains over the past 24 hours.