UniSwap Labs, the parent company of the leading decentralized exchange UniSwap, has secured new funding of $165 million in a Series B round, which values the firm at $1.66 billion. The funding round was led by Polychain Capital.
The round marks one of the biggest fund raises in the history of decentralized finance. UniSwap Labs plans to use the funds to expand its services across the globe. Existing investors like a16z, Paradigm, SV Angel, and Variant also participated in the funding round.
UniSwap, the leading decentralized exchange in the crypto space, has supported $1.2 trillion in trading volume and has emerged as a leading public infrastructure for exchanging digital assets.
The total value locked on the UniSwap protocol is $4.84 billion and the exchange commands 64% of the DEX trading volume.
The firm said in a blog post: “As Uniswap Labs focuses on products, a much broader ecosystem continues to grow and thrive beyond what any one company can do on their own. As an example, the governance community recently voted to create the Uniswap Foundation, which will contribute to the Protocol’s decentralized development and give at least $60 million in grants to community projects over the next few years.”
New initiatives
In an interview with Decrypt at the Messari Mainnet Conference in New York, Uniswap Labs COO Mary-Catherine Lader said the foundation is working on several innovative products to increase the DEX’s market share.
Lader said the top priority is to move trading volumes from centralized exchanges to the platform and for that, they have increased their focus on NFTs. In June, Uniswap acquired the NFT aggregator platform, Genie. Lader added that she is confident that NFT is a high-growth sector that would drive more people to embrace cryptos and swap tokens. UniSwap is planning to launch the NFT aggregator platform by the end of 2022.
