DeFi Startup Domination Finance Closes $3.2M Seed Round

Domination Finance has completed a $3.2 million seed round, the 14-month-old decentralized finance DeFi startup, announced Wednesday.

The company provides a non-custodial, decentralized exchange for trading dominance pairs and will use the funding to expand services on its platform, which tracks bitcoin and altcoin pricing using data from the cryptocurrency aggregator CoinGecko. The platform, which went live on Tuesday and is built on the Universal Market Access (UMA) protocol, enables users to trade bitcoin dominance with a clearer understanding of shifts in relative coin prices and with greater efficiency.

Bitcoin dominance is bitcoin’s share of the cryptocurrency calculated as a percentage by dividing its market cap by the overall crypto market cap. It indicates when bitcoin is outperforming or lagging the general crypto market and can help investors determine whether to increase or lessen their altcoin holdings.

“The idea here is simple — to satisfy a huge demand among crypto traders that was created in large part because the market lacked smooth-functioning, decentralized platforms like the one we created,” said Adrian Kolody, one of the company’s four co-founders. “We see Domination Finance as a key service for providing this popular trading functionality to a global market that features a rapidly growing number of potential users.”

In an interview with CoinDesk, Kolody said “he was over the moon” in raising a seed round after he and his co-founders financed the venture partly from their own savings.

ParaFi Capital led the round, which also included Dragonfly Capital, AU21, Shima Capital, LD Capital, Huobi Ventures, OKEx BlockdreamVentures, KNS Group, GSR, CoinGecko and angel investors familiar with the blockchain space. ParaFi invested $700,000, and Dragonfly Capital and AU21, $500,000 apiece.

“We’re product driven and that’s been a big motivation from the day we decided to work on this concept,” co-founder Michal Cymbalisty told CoinDesk. “So we’re excited to have more proper backing from major players in this space and to flesh it out into a full-fledged venture.”