Share this article
Hashflow, DeFi's 'Un-Automated' Market Maker, Launches With $3.2M in Funding
The project looks to combine the best of DeFi DEXs with the efficiencies of working with a professional trading desk.
By Zack Seward
Updated Sep 14, 2021, 12:48 p.m. Published Apr 29, 2021, 4:05 p.m.
Hashflow, a hybrid approach to decentralized finance (DeFi) trading, is launching its private alpha with $3.2 million in funding from Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital and Alameda Research.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
The project looks to take on automated market makers (AMMs) like Uniswap and SushiSwap with a novel approach that relies on their real-world counterparts: the professional market makers paid to make sure various crypto assets have baseline liquidity.
“We’re kind of like an un-automated market maker,” Hashflow founder Varun Vruddhula quipped in an interview.
Ethereum AMMs work without the need for such firms, relying on smart contracts to do the work of finding a market for any given token pair. Hashflow’s approach combines a headless front end with professional trading shops working behind the scenes.
“With Hashflow,” Vruddhula explained, “you have someone who specializes in market making do the market making. Now, they have the choice to accept funds from lazy LPs, and they all get to split the yield based on the equity ownership of the pool.”
Alameda Research, Galaxy Digital, Genesis Block and Ledger Prime are the trading desks involved at launch. Other backers include angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, Alex Pack and Kain Warwick.
Read more: ‘Party Starters’: Stellar Event Sees Frank Discussion of Crypto Market Makers
By bringing professional firms (and their off-chain pricing decisions) into the equation, Hashflow is able to reduce the gas fees associated with each trade – a key selling point as it looks to compete with DeFi’s top platforms among ever-price-conscious traders.
"Hashflow connects DeFi users with a network of CeFi market makers running liquidity pools,” Electric Capital’s Avichal Garg told CoinDesk via Telegram. “By routing orders across highly liquid pools run by the world's biggest market makers, Hashflow can permissionlessly offer the best prices with far lower gas fees than traditional AMMs.”
The product going live today will only feature private pools, Vruddhula said, but general DeFi investors can start adding money to the pools within the next three to four weeks.
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Solana’s Drift Launches v3, With 10x Faster Trades
With v3, the team says that about 85% of market orders will fill in under half a second, and liquidity will deepen enough to bring slippage on larger trades down to around 0.02%.
What to know:
- Drift, one of the largest perpetuals trading platforms on Solana, has launched Drift v3, a major upgrade meant to make on-chain trading feel as fast and smooth as using a centralized exchange.
- The new version will deliver 10-times faster trade execution thanks to a rebuilt backend, marking the largest performance jump the project has made so far.
Top Stories
