- Decentralized Exchange, Brine Fi, has raised $16.5 million at a $100M valuation in its latest funding series.
- Brine Fi plans to offer a smooth trading experience to its traders.
Decentralized Exchange, Brine Fi, Raises $16.5 Million
Pantera Capital leads a $16.5 million investment round in Brine Fi, a Zero-Knowledge powered decentralized exchange valued at $100 million.
Spartan Group, Elevation Capital, Goodwater Capital, Stakware Limited, Protofund Ventures, and Upsparks Venture participated in the exchange’s investment round.
After the FTX crash and the subsequent collapse of multiple centralized exchanges, the crypto market has treated CEXs with suspicion. The trading volume on centralized exchange has reduced drastically. For months, crypto users only prioritized withdrawals from CEXs over trading on such platforms. Even the biggest centralized exchange, Binance, was not left out.
The corruption revealed after the bankruptcy of crypto banks and exchanges led the crypto market to seek more decentralized alternatives like decentralized exchanges(DEX).
While decentralized exchanges are a low-risk option that equips traders with more control of their funds than centralized exchanges, it is difficult for users to trade on them.
Brine Fi seeks to resolve the challenges associated with trading on decentralized exchanges.
The non-custodial decentralized exchange launched its order book platform in May, and it amasses $300 million as monthly volume.
Brine Fi is a non-custodial order book spot DEX, powered by StarkWare, Ethereum’s scaling solution, to address common challenges faced by traders on DEX, which include slow transaction speed, frontrunning attacks, liquidity problems, and high trading fees.
Brine Fi stated that it understands how these challenges faced by several DEX traders affect profit margin and the outcome of a trade.
“Having built one of the largest crypto exchanges previously, we have had to diversify users’ assets constantly in multiple exchanges and venues to reduce asset loss risk due to troubled exchanges/parties; with Brine Fi, we make it easy for institutions, centralized exchanges, HFT traders and retail users to reduce their counterparty risk and at the same time get the best price for their orders in the industry,” Shaaran Lakshminarayanan, co-founder and CEO at Brine Fi, said in a statement.
The non-custodial decentralized exchange platform boasts of its achievement in building a high-speed execution exchange without these trading issues. Brine Fi seeks to provide traders with control of their wallets and the benefits of a centralized exchange.
“Brine tackles some of the most important challenges holding back institutional and mainstream user adoption in DeFi. There’s an urgent demand for a self-custodial execution layer that is faster, more reliable, user-friendly, and cost-effective,” an executive at Pantera Capital said.
Brine Fi launched in May, and it currently boasts of $3M daily trading volume.
The investment round was made at a noteworthy moment in the crypto market for venture capital firms. Crunchbase reported that crypto startups are receiving 76% less investment in Q2 of 2023 compared to the previous year.
The crypto bear market hit this summer harder than ever, with trading volumes plummeting deeper than before.
Although the market witnessed a temporary increase in trading volumes this year, trading volume on DExs has reduced to $1 billion daily, according to DefiLama.
