DeFiance Capital Seeking $100M in Funding to Invest in Liquid Tokens

Crypto Venture Capital firm, DeFiance Capital is in the process of raising as much as $100 million as it looks to invest in “Liquid Tokens.”

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According to three sources familiar with the matter who spoke to The Block, the fund is dubbed the “Liquid Venture Fund,” and one of the sources affirmed that more than 50% of the projected capital had been raised.

 

DeFiance Capital prides itself as a “sub-fund and share class of Three Arrows Capital” of crypto hedge fund giant Three Arrows Capital (3AC). However, when the Su Zhu-led firm crashed back in June owing to its exposure to the collapsed Terra ecosystem, DeFiance Capital denounced its integral association with 3AC.

 

The Arthur Cheong-led VC came out to say it is a separate entity that was managed independently of 3AC upon the latter’s liquidation. That DeFiance Capital has not gone bankrupt is a testament to its upright financial standing at this time.

 

The firm is known as a major backer of some of the iconic names in both the Non-Fungible Token (NFT), Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and Web3.0 ecosystems. Specifically, DeFiance Capital’s top portfolio includes Axie Infinity, Avalanche, Solana, and ConsenSys to mention a few.

 

According to two of the sources, DeFiance Capital may not wait until 100% of the fund is raised before it starts injecting the funds into the project’s liquid tokens. The liquid tokens are digital currencies that have either already been listed on a trading platform or are about to be listed. 

 

Some of the sources confirmed that the firm has raised part of the funds from a crypto fund as well as a few family offices. There is no idea whether DeFiance Capital has earmarked the tokens it wishes to invest in prior to the completion of the funds.


Raising funds through token sales is becoming very prevalent in today’s crypto world and has been exploited by a number of protocols including Polygon and 1inch in the past.

Image source: Shutterstock

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Axie Infinity Raises $860K While Their AXS Token Rises 55% In The Last 24 Hours

The Axie Infinity team is making moves. On the one hand, they raised $860K through a strategic sale of our governance token, AXS.” On the other, they announced an in-game decentralized exchange and their AXS increased in prize by 55% in the last 24 hours. Great numbers all around that would satisfy and attract any investor. And speaking about satisfied investors, their original backers were the people invited to Axie Infinity’s private sale.

Related Reading | New To Bitcoin? Learn To Trade Crypto With The NewsBTC Trading Course

Let’s digest all that part by part.

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Axie Infinity ‘s $860K Private Sale

The terms of the “strategic sale state the following:

“Axie Infinity raised $864,000 in a private sale of AXS to strategic investors in the middle of 2020. These investors purchased AXS at a 20% discount.

20% of the private sale tokens will be unlocked during the AXS public sale. The rest of the private sale tokens will be unlocked quarterly over the next 2 years.”

In the press release, they disclosed the investors:


  • Arca


  • Three Arrows Capital


  • DeFiance Capital


  • DeFi Capital


  • Sparq Ventures


  • Animoca Brands


  • Hashed


  • Dialectic

as well as angel investors:


  • Alexander John Amsel


  • Alex Svanevik (Nansen)


  • Bashylok Oleksander

The investors seem extremely satisfied. In a recent tweet, DeFiance Capital’s Zhu Su announced Axie Infinity and their Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) are the company’s most profitable seed investment by far. “Craziest thing is at the time of the round, it was so undersubbed that many people invested just to support ecosystem without any expectation of returns,” he adds for color. 

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The Great AXS 55% Rise

According to Chinese journalist Colin Wu, “Axie Infinity is launching a decentralized exchange and its price rose 55% in 24h. However, its trading volume and active users are declining.” He also said it was “the highest increase among top50 crypto.” At the time of writing, the number has decreased a little. According to Coinmarketcap, AXS is “up 42.90% in the last 24 hours.

The recently announced decentralized exchange will eliminate the need to leave Axie Infinity to trade tokens. “People want to acquire and use their tokens from the same place without having to use a bridge constantly,” growth lead Jeff Zirlin told The Block That website broke the Axie Infinity meets DeFi story, saying:

“The DEX could help keep users playing the game because it will remove certain frictions that exist for players who have to move their tokens off the platform to trade them. The DEX will be built on Ronin, an Ethereum-linked sidechain purpose-built for Axie Infinity.”

In the “Strategic Sale” press release, they quote Defiance Capital’s Arthur0x, who said:

“Axie has been building relentlessly since 2018 and we are impressed by their execution so far. Their vision of combining NFT, gaming and DeFi together is extremely exciting. We are thrilled to see Axie continue to be at the forefront of innovation in NFT gaming and DeFi space.”

AXSUSD price chart for 10/02/2021 - TradingView

AXSUSD price chart for 10/02/2021 - TradingView


AXS price chart for 10/02/2021 on Gemini | Source: AXS/USD on TradingView.com

Epilogue: Our Prediction

Just three months ago, when NewsBTC first covered Axie Infinity, we predicted: 

“In the long run, Axie Infinity could add new features to its game, a new game mode, more resources. The expansion of this universe is set to provide cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology with a real-world use case that nurtures the gaming experience.”

Related Reading | Jack Dorsey Plans to Build A Decentralized Exchange For Bitcoin

They did add new features, just not the ones we were expecting. 

At that time, AXS was trading at $17,47. Each token is worth $111.21 nowadays.

Featured Image: Axie Infinity screenshot from their press release | Charts by TradingView

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Big Guns Back $10M Investment in DeFi’s dYdX

Trading venue dYdX has raised $10 million in a Series B funding round led by Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital.

The platform, launched in 2017, offers a spread of decentralized trading products including both bitcoin and ether derivatives. The San Francisco-based startup plans to use the funds to increase its product offering, further decentralize its platform and increase its presence in China, according to a blog post shared in advance with CoinDesk.

“dYdX was the first DeFi app I ever used and I am elated to have the chance to invest in them today,” Three Arrows Capital co-founder Su Zhu said in a statement.

Three Arrows was joined by a lengthy roster of crypto investors in the Series B, including Wintermute, Hashed, GSR, SCP, Scalar Capital, Spartan Group and RockTree Capital. The round was also joined by previous Series A investors Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, among others.

The trading platform has had a gangbusters year with trading volumes across spot, margin and perpetual contracts jumping forty-fold – from $63 million in 2019 to $2.5 billion in 2020, the firm said.

Margin and spot trading made up the lion’s share of that activity clocking in at $1.9 billion for the year. The startup released its BTC and ETH perpetual products – which operate similarly to a futures contract but without a set expiry date – in May and August 2020, respectively. 

To date, dYdX’s impressive growth has been overshadowed by other decentralized finance (DeFi) products such as Compound Finance and Uniswap. 

Indeed, DeFi Pulse ranks dYdX as the 18th-largest DeFi market by total volume locked (TVL) at $150 million.

In a bid to climb the DeFi rankings, dYdX is introducing rollups, a technology designed to increase throughput and reduce gas fees. High gas fees on Ethereum have hamstrung young DeFi markets in recent months.

The dYdX solution involves a product based on StarkWare’s Cairo software and is expected to be rolled out in February.

“Our goal is to become one of the largest crypto exchanges – period. To accomplish this we’re building a Layer 2 system with StarkWare enabling cross-margined perpetuals, allowing for significant improvements to trading at scale,” dYdX founder Antonio Juliano told CoinDesk in a Telegram message.

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