HelloTrade, a blockchain-powered trading platform founded by former BlackRock crypto directors Wyatt Raich and Kevin Tang, has secured a $4.6 million seed round led by Dragonfly Capital. According to the company, the round was completed in under one week, a pace the founders attribute to strong investor confidence in the global market opportunity and their experience building large-scale digital asset products. At BlackRock, Tang and Raich helped launch the firm’s spot Bitcoin ETF, which became the fastest exchange-traded fund in history to reach $100 billion in assets.
The company is positioning itself as a way for users worldwide to gain frictionless leveraged exposure to equities, ETFs, commodities, and crypto. For years, access to global capital markets has been constrained by geography, high account minimums, complex derivatives, and slow-moving legacy brokerage systems. HelloTrade aims to remove those constraints with a mobile-first trading experience backed by MegaETH, which can process more than 100,000 transactions per second.
The platform aims to eliminate common technical barriers to digital asset trading. Users will not need to set up wallets, pay gas fees, or navigate specialized terminology. Instead, the app is designed to operate at the speed and with the familiarity of a traditional brokerage interface while enabling broader global participation in leveraged trading.
HelloTrade’s advisory network includes Arthur Hayes of Maelstrom, Josh Lim of FalconX, David C. from LeadBlock Partners and LeadBlock Bitpanda Ventures, Larry Florio of Ethena, and Andrew Saunders of Amazon. The founders say this group will support HelloTrade as it prepares to launch its mobile app on iOS and Android. A waitlist for early access is now open at hello.trade.
Raich and Tang first worked together at BlackRock’s digital assets division before deciding to build a new platform centered on global accessibility. Tang brings more than twelve years of financial services experience, while Raich previously worked in AI and robotics at Lockheed Martin before leading digital assets engineering at BlackRock. They believe that blockchain technology can meaningfully transform the structure of capital markets and provide investors worldwide with new channels for participation.
KEY QUOTES:
“Trading stocks with leverage shouldn’t be gated by geography or account minimums. We’ve now seen how crypto derivatives transformed access to digital assets. HelloTrade applies that same ethos to traditional equities, making it possible for investors around the world to participate in the world’s most dynamic markets”.
Kevin Tang, Co-Founder
“While leading the engineering team for BlackRock’s Digital Assets Lab, I had the privilege of building IBIT, ETHA, and BUIDL, some of the largest cryptoasset products in the world. That experience highlighted a tremendous opportunity to bring the same trust, discipline, and institutional standards we upheld at BlackRock to the rest of the world and build something truly transformative with HelloTrade.”
Wyatt Raich, Co-Founder And Prior Head Of Digital Assets Engineering At BlackRock
