SynFutures, a decentralized derivatives exchange focused on trading perpetual crypto futures, has raised $22 million in a Series B funding round.
Pantera Capital led the round, with HashKey Capital, SIG DT Investments (a part of the Susquehanna International Group) and others participating, SynFutures said Thursday.
The company started raising its Series B round last year and closed it about two months ago, Rachel Lin, co-founder and CEO of SynFutures, told The Block in an interview. She declined to comment on the valuation and structure of the round, but said SynFutures is open to the idea of a native token launch in the future. Any decision would depend on market conditions and the regulatory landscape, she added.
SynFutures’ Series B round comes nearly two and a half years after its $14 million Series A round in June 2021. It brings the company’s total funding to date to approximately $38 million.
What is SynFutures?
Launched in 2021, SynFutures is a decentralized exchange for trading perpetual crypto futures, a derivative that allows traders to bet on the future price of a cryptocurrency with leverage and without a fixed expiration date, making it possible to make a quick profit or loss based on price movements. .
Although deployed on several blockchains, SynFutures is currently the second largest derivatives protocol on Polygon, with a total value of over $6 million, according to DeFi Llama. SynFutures says it has recorded a cumulative trading volume of more than $22 billion to date.
SynFutures also launched a new version of its platform, V3, on the Ethereum testnet today. For mainnet, the platform focuses on supporting multiple blockchains, including Polygon and zkSync Era, an Ethereum Layer 2 network. The mainnet is expected to go live later this year or early next year. SynFutures V2 is available on Polygon and zkSync Era, while SynFutures V1 was deployed on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and BNB Chain.
Launch of SynFutures V3
SynFutures said it has developed a proprietary automated market maker model for its V3 platform called Oyster, which combines the best of order book and AMM models. “Our model combines the concentrated liquidity AMM (with a boost of up to 26,666x) and the order book (with an unlimited liquidity boost),” Lin said in the interview. With Oyster AMM, SynFutures appears to be competing directly with centralized exchanges.
“On CEXs and most traditional financial markets, derivatives trading eclipses spot market volumes by three to five times. Yet for DeFi, a huge gap remains for derivatives. To bridge that gap and thereby improve the overall health of the DeFi trading environment, our V3 platform is designed to improve trading efficiency, especially by concentrating liquidity,” said Lin.
Singapore-based SynFutures currently has a team of around 20 people, and with the new funding, it plans to hire additional people in technical and business development roles.