LI.FI – a leading multi-chain liquidity and data gateway – announced that it has raised $17.5 million in a Series A fundraising co-led by CoinFund and Superscrypt. This funding round also includes participation from Bloccelerate, L1 Digital, Circle, Factor, Perridon, Theta Capital, Three Point Capital, Abra, and nearly 20 angel investors.
LI.FI abstracts away the most crucial financial infrastructure to move in and out of any position on any chain — which is the one gateway to access all decentralized finance (DeFi). This helps traditional finance (TradFi) save valuable go-to-market time, research, integration, and maintenance overhead to avoid sunk costs in this fast-changing infrastructure environment for developers working on projects including but not limited to dApps, Web3 & other protocols.
The funding round comes after recent research from Bernstein revealed that many market experts believe finance is headed toward a “bank-free, decentralized future,” which will see decentralized finance (DeFi) become a “trillion-dollar asset pool with over $40 billion in revenue by 2028.” And the report highlighted that a far more sustainable, scalable, transparent (business) with improving token economics will see a revival of the industry. LI.FI is in a prime position to lead this charge.
The proceeds from the funding round will be used to accelerate the development of LI.FI’s offering across more blockchains, decentralized exchanges (DEXs), cross-chain bridges, etc. And it will also be used to bolster sales, business development, and marketing, and help better bridge the gap between traditional finance (TradFi) and DeFi in ways that would help onboard these institutions to the financial markets of the future.
LI.FI quickly became a leader in cross-chain liquidity aggregation as they quickly rose to handle over 96% of all cross-chain swap activity on MetaMask, according to data supplied by Dune in just 6 months. And LI.FI recently launched Jumper.Exchange, which is a multi-chain exchange interface that enables qualified users to swap virtually any asset for any other asset with just one click.
Later this year at the IEEE’s International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Cross-chain Workshop in Dubai, LI.FI will also introduce a proposed cross-chain framework meant to provide a high-level systematic overview of the security risks in cross-chain protocols by identifying, classifying, and analyzing the risk elements inherent in the design, implementation, and operation of such infrastructure. This framework was created in collaboration with ConsenSys with the goal of providing a general toolkit for reasoning about cross-chain protocols.
KEY QUOTES:
“This fundraise is vital to enabling us to execute our vision of a multi-chain future. Our goal is to enable access to any token and order flow across any chain, trading on any venue, in a seamless manner that helps bring the next one billion users to Web3.”
- Philipp Zentner, CEO at LI.FI
“We are thrilled to partner with Philipp, Max and the LI.FI team for the journey ahead, and to join the company board. Philipp and Max are a special breed of founders with incredible vision and execution capabilities; they’ve effectively created a new category in bridge and liquidity aggregation and produced phenomenal early growth, despite the bear market.”
“As we welcome an increasing number of builders and users to Web3, infrastructure to abstract away cross-chain transactions and liquidity aggregation is critical for adoption. LiFi has a unique position as not only the go-to place for consumers for cross-chain transactions, but also the first stop for developers and traditional financial institutions. Powering cross-chain transactions for the largest organizations in the industry, such as Metamask and Circle, is a testament to the quality of the team and the product.”
- Einar Braathen, Investor, CoinFund
