Decentralized Crypto Exchange Hashflow Raises $25M at $400M Valuation

Decentralized finance (DeFi) trading platform Hashflow has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round to now be valued at $400 million. The capital will be used to scale the product, expand the team and launch structured products later this year.

Investors in the round included Jump Crypto, Wintermute, GSR, LedgerPrime, QCP, Altonomy, Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital and the venture capital arms of cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase (COIN) and Kraken.

Founded in 2021, San Francisco-based Hashflow offers a decentralized exchange (DEX) backed by a request-for-quote (RFQ) pricing model that allows for cross-chain interoperability, low transaction or gas fees, high liquidity and no slippage, a common problem in volatile markets where the price of a trade changes between initiation and completion.

How it works

Hashflow said its RFQ model differs from most prominent DeFi trading platforms, which use automated market makers (AMM), or smart contract-backed protocols that use mathematical formulas to price assets. AMM models have their benefits but are also prone to high transaction fees and slippage. Uniswap is an example of an AMM.

Read more: What Is an Automated Market Maker?

Hashflow’s trading platform pairs traders with professional market makers to set token prices in what is essentially a type of on-demand price comparison shopping. The off-chain structure makes for better asset prices and means transactions are guaranteed to go through.

“Uniswap got people excited about DeFi by essentially bringing the simplicity of trading to anyone,” Hashflow founder Varun Kumar told CoinDesk in an interview. “We are scaling DeFi in the sense that, as markets mature, it all comes down to better pricing execution, guaranteeing that the trade will go through and being able to trade any asset class on any chain. We essentially solve those issues.”