One of promising decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, Hedget, has raised fresh capital for expanding its product lineup. It was announced on Monday that Hedget completed a seed round led by FBG Capital. This was one of the earliest investment funds in the crypto industry and was joined by NGC Ventures.
Hedget, which operates a decentralized options trading platform, plans on earmarking the funds for staffing and new DeFi product launches in 2020, according to a statement.
The new funding from Asia-based Blockchain funds arrives as DeFi applications have made notable headway in the last few years, with decentralized exchange platforms attracting significant volumes.
Options protocols were one of the latest additions to decentralized finance apps. Although these decentralized platforms function quite differently from centralized platforms, their edge has ties to what assets are being lent on.
“With the proliferation of DeFi protocols, users of Cryptocurrencies for the first time could enjoy the currency feature of their crypto holdings. Similar to fiat currencies, users could earn interest on their deposits, borrow assets with collateral and also trade derivatives - all accomplished in a decentralized way,” Hedget elaborates.
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Hedget positions itself as built on Ethereum L2 solution, but its core options platform is also running Chromia as a second-layer solution. This allows developers to create complex options with various parameters, while still being decentralized and fully transparent.
Blockchain platform Chromia is the brainchild of ChromaWay, which the company states that it enables decentralized applications to scale beyond what is currently available.
For those who came in late, ChromaWay was founded in 2014 and currently works with both the public and the private sectors. This is mainly around real estate and finance.
“We are excited to work with the Hedget team to build the decentralized options platform. We believe that options is an essential building block for the world of DeFi and there is huge market demand as the DeFi space is more mature,” said Alex Mizrahi, Chromia CTO.
As for its new backers, FBG Capital was founded in 2015 and is backed by venture capital funds, family offices as well as hedge funds in the US, China, and beyond. Based in Singapore, NGC established its first fund in 2017 and currently has around $400 million assets under management. It is notable that investments in the crypto space count blockchain projects, such as Algorand, CoinFLEX, and DappReview.
Commenting on the latest investment round, NGC managing partner, Roger Lim said: "Hedget is the Deribit of the DeFi space, innovatively making option trades available to the DeFI community solving the pain points of affordability and timeliness by leveraging Chromia's blockchain for a layer 2 settlement component to the trading platform.”
On top of that, FBG co-founder Vincent Zhou added, “Hedget team offers a good combination of blockchain technology and trading. We are happy to join this round and look forward to strengthening the partnership with FBG’s trading arm.”
