The Block: Alameda pours $3 million into retail trading bot platform as FTX continues push into retail

One of the bitcoin world's most prominent professional trading shops, Alameda Research, is backing retail crypto startup 3Commas in a $3 million funding round, the firm announced Tuesday.

The Estonia-registered company, which is known for offering retail traders the ability to construct automated bots to trade cryptocurrencies across several exchange venues, claims a userbase topping 100,000 traders and sees $4 billion in volume a month, according to its chief strategy officer Victor Cucos. The firm plans to use the fresh capital to beef up its back-end infrastructure, Cucos said in a phone interview with The Block.

"We see a lot of strategic opportunities in the DeFi world," he said, citing specifically integrations with Serum, a decentralized exchange that is widely promoted by Alameda co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

"We would love to be able to offer cross-asset functionality: crypto, FTX, etcetera."

As for Alameda, this represents the firm's latest investment in the market. Over the course of the last year, the liquidity provider has backed Ethereum analytics platform Dune Analytics , virtual AMM Perpetual Protocol as well as DeFi derivatives platform Opium . Commenting on the deal, Bankman-Fried said that there would be strategic synergies between 3Commas and FTX, the sister firm of Alameda.

"There's a lot of synergy between the businesses; 3Commas has built great tools, a great userbase, and an intuitive interface; FTX has first in class products and liquidity," Bankman-Fried said.

Indeed, this would be Alameda and FTX's latest push into retail, having previously acquired crypto data platform Blockfolio in a $150 million deal.