Decentralized market maker Arrakis Finance raises $4 million: Exclusive
Quick Take
- Arrakis Finance has raised $4 million from Uniswap Labs Ventures, Accel, Polygon Ventures and others.
- The decentralized market-making protocol plans to continue building and grow its team.
Arrakis Finance, a decentralized market-making protocol, raised $4 million in a seed funding round.
Investors included Uniswap Labs Ventures, Accel, Polygon Ventures and Robot Ventures. There was no lead investor in the round, and it was secured via a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT), Ari Rodriguez, co-founder of Arrakis Finance, told The Block. The round started in May and closed in September, Rodriguez added.
Arrakis Finance was established last year by Rodriguez and Hilmar Orth. Orth is a co-founder of Gelato Network, a popular tool for developers to automate smart contract execution on Ethereum. Rodriguez was a senior smart contract engineer at Gelato. The duo launched the first version (V1) of the Arrakis Finance protocol in April last year, which allows running algorithmic strategies on Uniswap V3.
Arrakis Finance plans to grow its current team of eight people and continue building its protocol with the fresh capital, Rodriguez said.
The funding for Arrakis Finance comes amid recent demises of centralized market makers such as Alameda Research and Three Arrows Capital. Arrakis is not the only market maker that has raised funds recently. Last month, crypto market maker Keyrock raised $72 million in a Series B funding round. In June, Flowdesk raised $30 million to expand its crypto market-making services.
"Arrakis V1 quickly became the go-to venue for deploying liquidity on Uniswap V3, with over $1.8 billion total value locked or TVL accounting for 25% of all liquidity on the protocol at its peak," Rodriguez said. "The most common use case for V1 vaults were managing tightly pegged pairs, for example, stablecoins like DAI-USDC."
Last week, Arrakis Finance launched V2 of its protocol, which can be "thought of as an abstraction layer on top of concentrated liquidity automated market makers (AMMs) like Uniswap V3," Rodriguez said. "It enables central limit order book (CLOB) like interactions."
Update: Fixes Orth's designation and Rodriguez's spelling.
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