Ethereum-based DeFi aggregator Zerion raised $8.2m in a Series A funding round led by Mosaic Ventures which also featured participation from Placeholder, Digital Currency Group, and Blockchain.com Ventures, among others.
Other investors who participated in this round include DeFi Alliance Fund, Continue Capital, SevenX Ventures, G1 Ventures, Bitscale Capital, Wintermute, The LAO and a group of angel investors from the crypto community.
Mosaic co-founder and partner, Toby Coppel, and venture partner at Placeholder, Brad Burnham, have joined Zerion’s board of directors as part of the round.
The company has now raised $10.2m in total, building on its $2m seed round in December 2019.
The new cash injection will help its user base grow from roughly 200,000 to above seven figures. The project plans to expand its team from 18 to 25 before 2022, and revamp its trading interface and portfolio tracking feature.
It is also planning to enable support for other popular blockchains and layer-twos that are sufficiently popular among DeFi users during the third quarter. The team estimates its customers open their app nine times daily on average.
Zerion helps users invest their DeFi portfolios on its platform, which contains content that customers can use to search, filter and evaluate the DeFi assets on the market. The non-custodial aggregation platform facilitates access to more than 60 Ethereum-based protocols, such as Aave, Yearn.finance, and Curve. Zerion, a competitor to other DeFi portals such as Zapper, has processed more than $600m worth of volume in 2021 so far with a median trade of $1,000.
The decentralized finance sector has exploded in popularity over the past year, with the total number of addresses that have interacted with DeFi protocols increasing from 25,000 to nearly 3 million in 12 months. Furthermore, the DeFi market cap surged about 556% earlier this year from $21.903bn on January 1 to an all-time high of about $143.682bn on May 11, according to data from CoinGecko.
However, more recently, the total market cap value for DeFi fell from the May peak to $78.886bn but is still up 981.7% from the year-ago date. Despite DeFi tokens suffering massive drawdowns amid the recent crypto market crash, most of the sector’s leading projects have still gained by multiple factors since the start of the year.
According to Zerion CEO Evgeny Yurtaev, DeFi’s potential still remains largely untapped by mainstream audiences because the world has never seen financial interoperability at this scale and most of DeFi remains too complex to access.
He said, “We saw early on that an internet-scale financial revolution cannot happen without internet-scale infrastructure that is permissionless, borderless, programmable and composable. DeFi is all of these things, and more.”
Without bankers as gatekeepers, DeFi users globally can access open lending platforms and “earn passive income on their digital assets through lending, staking and accruing yields that are virtually unheard of in a traditional savings account,” Yurtaev said.
In the future, the company hopes that it becomes the all-inclusive portal to the world of DeFi, the way Google provides information or Amazon provides consumers access to a plethora of goods, Yurtaev said.
Echoing a similar sentiment, Coppel said, “…DeFi is creating an entirely new alternative financial ecosystem and Zerion enables millions of users to easily and transparently interact with it.”
Copyright © 2021 FinTech Global
