Exchange to Boost Crypto Derivatives Access With Fundraising – Bloomberg

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Decentralized derivatives exchange SynFutures announced the close of an oversubscribed round of financing as it seeks to make cryptocurrency futures more accessible.

The $14 million Series A round of financing led by Polychain Capital LLC included participation from Framework, Pantera Capital, Bybit, Wintermute, CMS, Kronos, and IOSG Ventures.

“We believe SynFutures will ultimately democratize the futures market by empowering users to trade anything at any time,” Rachel Lin, founder and CEO of SynFutures, said in a statement. Lin was a founding partner of Matrixport, one of Asia’s largest digital asset neobanks, and previously ran structured derivatives sales at Deutsche Bank.

SynFutures allows anyone to add arbitrary trading pairs with any maturity date and list their own futures contracts with just a few clicks; it also offers trading in assets like crypto, gold and equities.

“In traditional financial markets, derivatives trading volume far eclipses that of spot trading and we’re now seeing a similar shift in crypto, especially in centralized exchanges,” said Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder and chief executive officer of Polychain Capital, in the statement.

SynFutures is giving access to a small set of initial users, with plans to open up its platform to all users next month. The firm is also planning some new products, including hash rate futures, the world’s first fully decentralized hash rate derivative that allows users to hedge or speculate on the mining difficulty of Bitcoin.