Decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator DEX.AG has raised $3.1 million and is rebranding to Slingshot.
Born out of the Concourse Open Community, the same group that created decentralized finance (DeFi) rankings board DeFi Pulse, Slingshot aims to help users find the best price for any given token trade on Ethereum.
That said, this space has grown quite crowded, with similar solutions such as 1inch, ParaSwap, 0x’s Matcha and even the prominent Ethereum wallet MetaMask.
The round was led by Framework Ventures, with additional participation from many others, including Electric Capital, IDEO CoLab, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Digital Currency Group, Robot Ventures and more.
The dream of making trades without turning over custody of crypto assets to a third party has been a longstanding aim for the industry. DEXs struggled for a long time to compete with centralized competitors, but that’s starting to turn around. For example, one of the leaders, Uniswap, is actually doing more volume than Coinbase by some metrics.
DEX aggregators offer the insight that once users can trade straight from their wallets, they have no reason to look at trades on one exchange. Traders might as well look at all the DEXs for every trade.
“The open and permissionless nature of DeFi brings a generational platform shift that presents a new paradigm in financial services, unifying diverse global communities and allowing them to participate in emerging economies or create their own without the need to ask for permission,” Slingshot’s CEO, Clinton Bembry, said in a press release.
Slingshot was first built at a hackathon in 2018 and has seen over $100 million in volume so far, according to the company.
“Slingshot’s best-in-class DEX aggregator is built to provide the seamless user experience, low latency and inexpensive transactions that DeFi users deserve,” Framework Ventures co-founder Vance Spencer said in a press release.