Washington, D.C.-based Bitflow Labs, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, has raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding led by New York-based Portal Ventures, founded by former Goldman executive Evan Fisher.
Other participants included Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Bitcoin Startup Lab, Big Brain Holdings, Newman Capital, Genblock Capital, Tykhe Block Ventures, Insignius Capital, Side Door Ventures, Coindex Capital, Marin Ventures, SkyVision Capital, Spicy Capital, and some angel investors.
‘Big Momentum’
“Bitflow has seen some amazing organic growth during the private beta phase, with the TVL [total value locked] rocketing from $30K to nearly $4M in less than a month,” said co-founder Dylan Floyd. “There’s an appetite to put bitcoin to work in DeFi as a productive asset, and building through the bear [market] has prepared us for the upcoming bull market and many more cycles down the road.”
Called the first decentralized exchange, Bitflow claims to solve the problem of “fractured liquidity” across the bitcoin ecosystem. Its protocol design is similar to decentralized exchanges on Ethereum, but with an important difference — the capital-efficient trading infrastructure is built on bitcoin rails, the company said. The protocol enables arbitrage across different flavors of bitcoin and helps users generate tangible BTC yield on their holdings.
Catching the Bounce
“Bitcoin is experiencing a renaissance, and we’ve been actively investing into infrastructure to power this,” said Portal Ventures’ investment partner Catrina Wang, who in 2017 launched Deloitte’s blockchain initiative. Wang also praised Bitflow’s co-founders, and their “product insights, early traction, and long-term vision to win a TAM that is 3x larger than Ethereum.”
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Besides enabling direct trading without intermediaries, Bitflow leverages technologies such as Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions, Atomic Swaps, Layer-2 smart contracts, Stacks Bitcoin, and decentralized liquidity pools to expand choices for users.
“Bitflow represents a significant leap in integrating traditional bitcoin with DeFi,” said Anthony Cheng of San Francisco-based Newman Capital. “It aligns with our vision of modernizing crypto investments to secure & develop innovative financial solutions.”
New York-based Bitcoin Frontier Fund, which is credited with being Bitflow’s first investor, is bullish about the startup’s prospects. “We at Bitcoin Frontier Fund identified Bitflow’s extraordinary potential from the get-go,” said Kevin Williams, an investment partner at the firm.
