SynFutures Announces USD22M Series B and Launches V3 Perpetual Futures DEX with Proprietary Oyster AMM

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Oct 20, 2023, 09:00 ET

Innovative Oyster AMM combines onchain order book and AMM to upgrade DeFi trading efficiency
Investors include Pantera Capital, SIG DT Investments, HashKey Capital; funds to support multi-chain expansion and new product development

SINGAPORE, Oct. 20, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- SynFutures, a leading decentralized exchange for perpetual futures, today announced it has recently closed a Series B fundraising round of US$22 million, led by Pantera Capital, with participation from SIG DT Investments, a member of the Susquehanna International Group (SIG DTI) and HashKey Capital. This latest round brings the total funding SynFutures has raised to date to US$38 million.

The fundraising announcement comes alongside the launch of the decentralized exchange's (DEX's) new V3 platform for perpetual futures ("perps"). The upgrade features SynFutures' proprietary Oyster automated market maker (Oyster AMM). Deployed fully on-chain, it combines the best of orderbook and AMM models in a single approach. Designed to enhance decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity and capital efficiency, SynFutures V3 aims to compete head on with the crypto finance industry's centralized exchanges (CEXs).

"On CEXs and in most traditional financial markets, derivatives trading eclipses spot market volumes by three to five times. Yet for DeFi, a huge gap remains for derivatives. To address that gap, and thereby improve the overall health of the DeFi trading environment, our V3 platform is designed to enhance trading efficiency, especially by concentrating liquidity. Our hope is that V3 proves a tipping point, and our Oyster AMM empowers both professional and retail traders to access DeFi derivatives trading at a mass scale," said Rachel Lin, Co-founder and CEO of SynFutures. "The name "Oyster AMM" reflects the completely permissionless listing of futures trading pairs on SynFutures DEX, as well as the 'pearls' that appear on a liquidity curve with limit orders, as is the case with our model."

V3 Bridges the DeFi Derivatives Gap as Crypto Winter Set to Defrost in 2024

SynFutures is launching its V3, with the mainnet launch set for Q4 2023, in the anticipation that various market forces - including the upcoming Bitcoin halving, accelerating traditional finance (TradFi) participation in Web3, and the coming end of the Fed's tightening cycle - will thaw the current crypto winter in 2024.

Demand for DeFi services and adoption has seen significant growth since FTX's implosion last year, as investors are placing greater value on transparency and self-custody. But market efficiency, especially capital efficiency, has remained a major challenge for DeFi. While DeFi platforms including UNISWAP have introduced concentrated liquidity models for spot trading, SynFutures V3 extends such support to the DeFi perpetual futures market through the specially-designed Oyster AMM.

What is Oyster AMM?

Specifically tailored for perpetual futures, Oyster AMM enables permissionless listing of any trading pairs, encompassing major crypto assets, altcoins, NFTs and indices in 30 seconds, all while ensuring two-sided liquidity, where users can provide just a single token of a trading pair, as was the case with SynFutures V1 and V2.

To boost liquidity, the Oyster AMM presents an innovative market making paradigm by seamlessly integrating concentrated liquidity and on chain order book in a single model, offering a unified liquidity system tailored to active traders and passive liquidity providers. The model facilitates liquidity concentration within specific price ranges and incorporates leverage for automated market makers, as well as introduces an order book system deployed fully on chain. This ensures security and robustness by eliminating dependence on centralized administrators and mitigating vulnerabilities across on-off chain systems.

"The SynFutures team is seasoned in both traditional finance best practices and pioneering blockchain innovation. And this latest upgrade sets a new bar for efficiency in DeFi trading, thanks to the integrated model combining AMM with an on-chain order book, in an innovative approach that's tailored to derivatives," said Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera Capital.

"As more TradFi players chart a course into digital assets, SynFutures is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between traditional and decentralized finance. We are impressed with the team's long-term vision and robust product roadmap, which we see as foundational for traditional institutions to deepen their engagement in the growing digital asset ecosystem," said Vir Anand, Investor for SIG DT Investments, a member of the Susquehanna International Group.

"We've been backers of SynFutures since day zero, and from that moment on Rachel Lin, Yizhou Cao, and their team have been relentlessly driving to today's achievement -- a derivatives market with such a high level of permissionless market creation that it transforms DeFi itself," said Adam Goldberg, co-founder of Standard Crypto, which led SynFutures' Seed round at the end of 2020.

Since launching its V1 beta in October 2021, SynFutures' DEX has achieved US$22 billion in cumulative trading volume to date. The fresh capital injection from the new and returning investors will be used to drive product development, starting with the V3 mainnet rollout, as well as future ecosystem and multi-chain expansion.

About SynFutures

SynFutures is a next-generation Web3.0 decentralized derivatives infrastructure that creates an open and trustless derivatives market by enabling trading on anything with a price feed anytime. SynFutures democratizes the derivatives market by employing an Amazon-like business model, giving users the tools to freely trade any assets and list arbitrary futures contracts within seconds.

Deployed on multiple blockchains, SynFutures is currently the largest derivatives exchange on Polygon and is among the top three most actively used decentralized derivatives exchanges. Backers include Tier 1 Web3 institutional investors Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Susquehanna International Group (SIG), Hashkey Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Standard Crypto, and Framework Ventures, and team members have extensive experience at global financial institutions, fintech companies, and blockchain technology companies such as Alipay, Bitmain, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Matrixport, and Nomura Securities.

SOURCE SynFutures