The funding for Uniswap’s web application, developer tools, and NFT projects is indicative that investors believe DeFi to be the financial technology of the future.
Uniswap Labs, a decentralized exchange, raised $165 million in a Series B funding round, led by the cryptocurrency-focused investment company Polychain Capital. The company is now valued $1.66 billion thanks to the recent raise.
The investment, which seems to be the largest ever for the decentralized finance sector, is a much-needed boost for the larger crypto market, which has spent most of 2022 entrenched in a brutal downturn.
The funding will allow Uniswap to make further investments in the introduction of its non-fungible token (NFT), developer tools, and online app, as well as in its transition to serve mobile users.
The cryptocurrency division of venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, SV Angel, and Variant Investments were among the additional returning investors in the round.
The self-taught programmer behind Uniswap, Hayden Adams, said he sees the fundraising round and the project’s success as endorsements for decentralized initiatives, some of which are managed nearly entirely by autonomous code.
“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 infrastructure failed, and a lot of decentralized entities prevailed,” said Adams.
Adams claimed that although Uniswap Labs is not profitable now, it plans to use the Series B capital to increase the range of products it offers and turn profitable in the next few years. Creating an NFT aggregator, according to him, will “open new interactions between tokens and NFTs.”
The growth of decentralized exchanges has outpaced that of centralized exchanges over the past two years, and it is anticipated that this gap will widen as users turn away from centralized exchanges because of their burdensome know-your-customer requirements.