ParaFi Invests and Begins Staking in Bitfinex Spin-Out Exchange

DeFi-focused fund ParaFi Capital has invested $450,000 in USDT, along with D1 Ventures, and will start staking on Ethereum-based exchange DeversiFi.

• DeversiFi announced Friday that ParaFi and D1 had together invested $450,000, in tether tokens, in return for governance token nectar (NEC).
• San Francisco-based ParaFi's portfolio includes other DeFi projects such as Aave, Curve, MakerDAO and Kyber Network, into which ParaFi invested in June.
• D1 Ventures' previous investments include The Graph, Thorchain, Tellor and Nest Protocol.
• Formerly Ethfinex, DeversiFi is a non-custodial exchange spun out of Bitfinex in 2019 and that re-released its trading platform with a newly built privacy layer earlier this year.
• The exchange acts as a hybrid where trades are executed off-chain and settled on-chain in batches every hour; this means DeversiFi can settle 9,000 transactions every second.
• ParaFi and D1 have committed to staking tokens in the platform's governance protocol necDAO, so they'll be able to play a role in the project's direction as they would with an equity stake.
• DeversiFi co-founder Ross Middleton says there is currently 17,000 ether (around $6.7 million) pledged to the necDAO, most being trading fees collected from when it was Ethfinex.
• Both funds will have a role in determining how these funds are spent – one current proposal is using ETH to connect necDAO to liquidity pools and allow it to earn a passive income.

See also: IDEX Raises $2.5M to Rebuild Hybrid Exchange for Algorithmic Traders