- With the help of Electric Capital, Alliance, Luca Netz, Santiago Santos, Zagabond, DCF God, and others, Wasabi has raised $3 million.
- Since January, Wasabi, a meme coin, and NFT leverage trading system, has experienced trading volume of over $500 million.
Electric Capital led a $3 million seed fundraising round for Wasabi, a meme coin and NFT leverage trading system.
Additional investors included Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins, Alliance, Memeland, Spencer Ventures, co-founder of Magic Eden Zhouxun Yin, angel investor Santiago Santos, and prominent figures from the cryptocurrency world on Twitter, including Cygaar, Zagabond, DCF God, and Bob Loukas.
Wasabi: What is it?
Derman stated that there was a shortage of financial infrastructure for long-tail assets and that Wasabi is a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol that enables users to trade assets like meme coins and NFTs with leverage. Wasabi was developed in order to facilitate effective price discovery for such assets.
Users can stake, long, and short meme coins and NFTs with Wasabi. According to Derman, flagship assets like ETH and USDB have up to 10x leverage, while more exotic, lower liquidity assets have between 2-3x and 10x leverage.
Wasabi asserts that it is the first protocol that allows leveraged trading that is supported by real assets. Derman stated that Wasabi provides on-chain perpetual futures, or PEPs, which eliminate counterparty risk by backing all trades with assets.
Compared to traditional perp decentralized exchanges like Aevo and Hyperliquid, which depend on market makers to maintain their synthetic pricing feed in line with the real price of assets on-chain, this is a very different scenario.
Wasabi in a Flash
Ethereum and Blast, an Ethereum Layer 2, support the Wasabi protocol. However, according to Derman, it has the highest user activity on Blast and has made liquidity available for initiatives like Juice Finance, Pacmoon, and Blastopians.
Prior to launching its perpetual futures product on Blast, Wasabi originally introduced its options and perpetual futures products on Ethereum. According to Derman, Wasabi has over 18,000 traders who have generated over $500 million in trading activity since January. With over 66,000 liquidity providers, the protocol currently has a total value locked of over $111 million.
With new money in place, Wasabi intends to grow from its current six employees to ten in the near future, according to Derman. He continued by saying that the initiative is employing a head of operations, a back-end developer, a quantitative engineer, and an engineer for smart contracts.
Disclaimer : This article was created for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. An asset’s past performance does not predict its future returns. Before making an investment, please conduct your own research, as digital assets like cryptocurrencies are highly risky and volatile financial instruments.
