Parallel Finance, a lending startup has raised around $22 million in a Series A funding round that valued the Kusama and Polkadot focused decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol at $150M.
However, the round, one of individual biggest hauls for a project developing on Polkadot’s multi-chain network, comes just months after Parallel’s pre-seed round of funding of $2M. also, the round was led by Polychain Capital with participation from Blockchain Capital, Ventures Partners, Alameda Research, and Slow Ventures.
Parallel Finance appears to fasten growth as a DeFi alternative to Ether, the market leader despite low processing speed but high fees. A competing ecosystem that connects into multiple blockchains, Polkadot, does not have as powerful a protocol landscape, yet. Also, Parallel’s response is a suite of automated market making, staking & derivatives facilities for Polkadot along with Kusama, its staging area counterpart.
Project founder Yubo Ruan said Parallel has amassed 3,000 users in the five months after launch. A significant number of them are institutional his backers included. The reason that we bring a lot of investors especially Polychain driving the round is that they are one of the largest DOT holders and Kusama (KSM) holders.
He said Polychain and its VC counterparts accepted Parallel’s governance tokens in lieu of traditional equity payouts. We intend to do an equity holding organization in the future once we launch the protocol, Ruan stated. Ruan said Parallel plans to double its staff in the following six months. At the present time, it wields 20 full-timers, five months prior it was just him.
The powerful development is necessary to stay aware of expansion demands, Ruan wants to enlist specialty engineers that can work for ecosystems other than just Polkadot. Ruan said Parallel will turn into an umbrella brand with footholds across numerous blockchains.
