Uniswap raised $165 million in a Series B funding round led by Polychain Capital to “bring web3 to everyone,” the decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) announced Thursday. Other investors that participated in the round include a16z crypto, Paradigm, SV Angel, and Variant.
Uniswap’s Valued at $1.66B Following Largest-ever DeFi Investment
Ethereum-powered decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap announced Thursday it has secured $165 million in a Series B funding round spearheaded by Polychain Capital, along with participation from a16z crypto, Paradigm, SV Angel, and Variant. The financing, which represents the largest-ever investment in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, values Uniswap at $1.66 billion.
The funding comes just two weeks after reports that Uniswap is in talks to raise between $100 and $200 million. The DEX was discussing a new funding round with Polychain Capital and “a Singapore-based sovereign fund.”
Uniswap’s Series B round takes place amid a massive downturn in the crypto market, which has led to the collapse of several centralized projects such as Celsius Network and Voyager Digital. On the other hand, a number of decentralized projects thrived during the downturn, noted Hayden Adams, CEO of Uniswap Labs.
“For us, the industry has started to prove itself and we’re seeing the value of it, especially in this bear market when a lot of centralized infrastructures failed, and a lot of decentralized entities prevailed.”
Hayden Aams, CEO of Uniswap Labs
Uniswap’s Growth and Web3 Plans
The DEX intends to use the fresh funding to expand its product lineup and become financially sustainable in the years to come. A portion of the funding will also be used to develop a non-fungible token (NFT) aggregator that will “unlock new interaction between tokens and NFTs,” Adams added.
The new investment follows a Series A funding round in August 2020, when Uniswap secured $11 million from Andreessen Horowitz and several other investors. Since then, Uniswap became the largest decentralized exchange in the world by volume, followed by Curve and PancakeSwap.
Last month, Uniswap Foundation distributed a total of $1.8 million in the first wave of grants aimed at nurturing the growth of the protocol and the Uniswap community. The largest recipient of the first wave of grants was Uniswap Diamond, which received $808,752.
Going forward, Adams said Uniswap will focus on making web3 more accessible to the broader community and challenge the current so-called web2 model, which competes to “control users.” Instead, web3 “has an opportunity to compete by empowering users. You compete not by owning but by earning their business,” he added.
This article originally appeared on The Tokenist
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