Community-governed DEX EmiSwap raises $104M in private funding

Despite the recent $21 billion loss in DeFi within the past two weeks, the DEX space is still drawing in high trading volumes and investors are pouring in their funds to assure its future.

EmiSwap — a community-governed decentralized exchange (DEX) — has raised $104 million from a large number of investors, each of whom put down a maximum sum of $25,000 each. 

Backers of the exchange, which runs as a decentralized autonomous organization, include Carl Moon, Box Mining, Edna, TMM Holdings’ Jason D, Hodl.global, ExNetwork Fund, and Inclusion Crypto Fund.

EmiSwap describes itself as a gamified and decentralized automated market maker exchange. Automated market makers -based exchanges do not rely on order books like regular exchanges but instead use mathematical formulas to price assets. They also provide liquidity from multiple pools and use smart or peer-to-peer contracts for trading.

EmiSwap’s offer to investors, in addition, is a full refund on Ethereum gas fees. In Q3 of this year, it also plans to launch non-fungible token cards — called NFT Magic Cards — as a gamified mechanism that aims to draw in more users. The platform’s strategy also includes offering rewards to incentivize liquidity providers and swappers, providing cross- and multi-blockchain support, and encouraging ESW token holders to vote on the organization’s future development.

The DEX is the first project launched as part of the EmiDAO alliance, whose members include Alpha Sigma Capital, DigiFinex Exchange, IDCM Exchange, HollaEx Exchange and others. Between them, the partners’ experience spans a range of expertise across cryptocurrency exchange operations, DeFi projects, financial services and regulatory compliance (eKYC and AML). 

Other recent raises in the DeFi space include 16 prominent blockchain investment firms’ backing of the DeFi interoperability protocol Composable Finance and DiversiFi’s fundraise from crypto venture capital firms. Both were significantly smaller sums of capital, at $7 million and $5 million respectively.