Blade, a crypto derivatives platform, has raised $4.3 million in a seed funding round, prior to its launch in the next three weeks.
According to Monday’s TechCrunch report, the upcoming exchange raised funds from Silicon Valley giants including Coinbase, SV Angel, A.Capital, Slow Ventures, Justin Kan, and Adam D’Angelo.
Scheduled to launch in the next three weeks, the exchange is set to offer perpetual crypto swap contracts. These instruments are very similar to traditional futures contracts and grant investors the ability to profit off of selling digital assets, either short or long, similar to futures contracts. However, unlike futures contracts, perpetual contracts have no expiration date.
These types of futures contracts are getting very popular in the crypto industry, and many big players, including Gate.io and OKEx launched similar products earlier this year.
Markets with less red tapes
Blade is primarily targeting the lucrative east Asian markets with its upcoming products. According to its website, the exchange will list Bitcoin against two fiats - USD and KRW - while the other five instruments will be XRP/USDT, BNB/USDT, ZEC/USDT, XMR/BTC, and DOGE/USDT.
Except for the two fiat-based products, the rest will be listed as vanilla contracts, meaning they will provide the trader the right, but a mandate, to buy the contract.
The London-based exchange will also provide Leverage up to 150x on BTC/USD and BTC/KRW contracts.
Despite the futures crypto futures market being very lucrative, BitMEX in July saw the record amount in fund outflow from the exchange. This was triggered likely by the report of an ongoing investigation on the exchange by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
“In the long term, we want to be the CME of crypto,” Jeff Byun, co-founder and chief executive of Blade, told TechCrunch. “Coinbase and Binance are building this foundational structure for crypto, but I think we are too and in a sense that derivatives are at their core about risk transfer, we want to be building the foundational layer for risk transfer in the crypto markets.”
