D8X, an institutional-grade decentralized exchange (DEX) for derivatives on Polygon zkEVM, announced a $1.5 million pre-seed round with support from Polygon Ventures and various other investors.
The capital will help D8X launch “a decentralized derivatives trading platform in the second half of 2023 that provides a white-labeling solution to trading partners seeking access to powerful derivatives products.”
The pre-seed round for D8X “includes additional participation from Axelar Network, Swissborg Ventures, Cogitent Ventures, Veris Ventures, G1 Ventures, Pragma Ventures, CryptoDiscover, SuDo Research, Block Consult, and others.”
Polygon Co-Founder Sandeep Nailwal, said:
“DeFi is reshaping the future of finance. Projects like D8X are building the infrastructure that will help legacy finance to leap into web3.”
Bridging CeFi to DeFi
D8X’s founders bet on centralized players wanting “to offer decentralized crypto derivatives to their clients without having to hire experts to develop in-house market making and trading engines.”
D8X provides a white-label solution to partners who “act as brokers and earn revenue by running their own front ends powered by the D8X trade engine and shared liquidity.”
Financial Engineering On Chain
D8X’s sophisticated on-chain solutions curb costs and “offer products that are competitive with centralized exchanges, such as cost-efficient hedging, a prerequisite for building a highly functional derivative trading space. Contract-trading allows other DeFi protocols to efficiently hedge on-chain.”
Their perpetuals can be “calibrated for a wide range of assets and support — as a first in DeFi — linear, inverse and quanto perpetuals. At launch, a liquidity pool in Lido’s staked ETH (stETH) will enable liquidity providers to earn the Lido yield while simultaneously participating in the DEXs earnings.”
D8X is reportedly the first business-to-business (B2B) DEX built “on Polygon’s zkEVM, harnessing the power of zero knowledge proofs to cut transaction fees, increase security and scale operations across the Polygon and Ethereum networks.”
Polygon Director of Growth Hamzah Khan, said:
“D8X is part of a driving force of innovation and community in Polygon’s 2.0 zero-knowledge space,”
D8X is described as “a fully decentralized DEX following regulatory guidance from Switzerland’s financial market regulator FINMA.
D8X co-founder Caspar Sauter said:
“We thank all our investors for believing in D8X’s vision to bring truly decentralized derivatives as white-labeling solutions to institutions. With best-in-class financial engineering and risk management, D8X is changing the way decentralized derivatives are traded.”
The production code-base of D8X was “audited by PeckShield and an earlier version was audited by Hacken.”
As noted in the update, D8X is “a Polygon Ventures-supported institutional-grade perpetual futures DEX with a financial engineering approach that elevates the way perpetual futures can be traded on-chain.”
Think of a powerful and decentralized trading platform “on Polygon zkEVM that offers white-labeling to institutions.” D8X’s pricing mechanism adapts “to changing market conditions protecting liquidity providers and profitable traders in volatile periods, resulting in superior DeFi trading conditions.”