ParaFi Invests and Begins Staking in Bitfinex Spin-Out Exchange
DeFi-focused fund ParaFi Capital has invested $450,000 in USDT, along with D1 Ventures, and will start staking on Ethereum-based exchange DeversiFi.
DeversiFi announced Friday that ParaFi and D1 had together invested $450,000, in tether tokens, in return for governance token nectar (NEC).
San Francisco-based ParaFi’s portfolio includes other DeFi projects such as Aave, Curve, MakerDAO and Kyber Network, into which ParaFi invested in June.
D1 Ventures’ previous investments include The Graph, Thorchain, Tellor and Nest Protocol.
Formerly Ethfinex, DeversiFi is a non-custodial exchange spun out of Bitfinex in 2019 and that re-released its trading platform with a newly built privacy layer earlier this year.
The exchange acts as a hybrid where trades are executed off-chain and settled on-chain in batches every hour; this means DeversiFi can settle 9,000 transactions every second.
ParaFi and D1 have committed to staking tokens in the platform’s governance protocol necDAO, so they’ll be able to play a role in the project’s direction as they would with an equity stake.
DeversiFi co-founder Ross Middleton says there is currently 17,000 ether (around $6.7 million) pledged to the necDAO, most being trading fees collected from when it was Ethfinex.
Both funds will have a role in determining how these funds are spent – one current proposal is using ETH to connect necDAO to liquidity pools and allow it to earn a passive income.
See also: IDEX Raises $2.5M to Rebuild Hybrid Exchange for Algorithmic Traders