0x Labs – a San Francisco based decentralized exchange infrastructure provider – recently closed a Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Greylock Partners. The firm raised $70 million in total, with added help from Pantera, Jump Capital, OpenSea, and famous American actor/ musician Jared Leto.
- 0x’s valuation remains undisclosed, but it raised $24 million from its ZRX token sale back in 2017, and $15 million in a Series A led by Pantera capital last year.
- The popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase also took part in the round. The platform began leveraging 0x’s DEX technology to power its own NFT marketplace last week.
- ZRX, which is the native token of 0x, skyrocketed over 50% to $1.10 following Coinbase’s announcement. It has since retraced and lost nearly all of its gains on the week – but is still up about 20% this month.
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“We’re planning to use this funding to continue the growth of 0x Labs, expanding our [62-member] team and doubling down on the current products and services that we’re offering,” said Will Warren, cofounder and co-CEO of 0x Labs, according to Forbes.
- The 0x protocol enables peer-to-peer NFT and digital asset trading across different blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche, Optimism, BNB Chain, and Celo. The team claims to offer 50% lower fees than more popular NFT marketplaces like LookRare and OpenSea.
- Sarah Guo, general partner at Greylock, stated that investors are particularly bullish on 0x’s NFT swaps, which it plans to expand to other ecosystems like Solana.
- 0x Labs also enables developers to integrate such DEX functionality into their own applications.
- The protocol currently handles about $1.5 billion in transaction volume on a weekly basis. That’s still significantly smaller than that of more popular DEXs like Uniswap, which manage nearly $50 billion.
- However, 0x also operates Matcha – the second largest DEX aggregator available right now, besides 1Inch. DEX aggregators optimize trades by finding the best price options across a range of decentralized exchanges.