Dubai-based DeFi platform raises $4.5 million in seed funding

• Dubai decentralized finance platform ZKX has raised $4.5 million seed funding amidst a crashing crypto market.
• Investors include StarkWare, Alameda Research, Amber Group, Huobi and Crypto.com.
• The platform specializes in faster transactions on blockchain with minimal gas fees.

Dubai-based DeFi platform ZKX raised $4.5 million in seed funding today from StarkWare, Alameda Research, Amber Group, Huobi, Crypto.com and others.

The decentralized finance platform helps make faster transactions and keeps gas fees low, and is built on StarkNet. These funds were raised in spite of a cryptocrash in particular and funding winter in general.

“The downturn is driven by the Federal Reserve tightening interest rates and driving de-risking across asset classes. Alameda, Crypto.com, and our other partners have been actively fostering and building the Web3 ecosystem for years. This should only strengthen the ecosystem in the long run by cleaning up the bad apples and focusing on the strongest players,” said Eduard Jubany Tur, Founder at ZKX.

The funding will go towards further development of its open-source protocol, DAO funding and growth of the ZXK ecosystem.

ZKX was founded in 2021 by Eduard Jubany Tur, Naman Sehgal, and Vitaly Yakovlev. The team has hired from Flipkart, PayTM, and Byju’s, with decades of shared experience in venture building and scaling technology startups in over eight countries.

It had earlier received investment from Sandeep Nailwal, co-Founder, Polygon, and Ashwin Ramachandran, General Partner, DragonFly Capital.

The platform aims to address some of the key challenges of the DeFi market, such as over-reliance on centralized entities, scalability, high gas fees for traders and painful user experience.

“We are determined to build an exchange that breaks down the barriers to using DeFi by building a protocol that enables trading derivatives of assets on StarkNet. Our goal is to expand our reach across emerging markets, enabling users to have fair representation within a DAO,” said Jubany.