Crypto Derivatives Exchange Stream Trading Raises $1.5M in Seed Funding

Stream Finance, a new crypto derivatives platform on the Ethereum blockchain, has secured $1.5 million in funding from Polychain and some angel investors.

According to an interview with CoinDesk, Diogenes Casares, founder of Stream Trading, announced that their seed funding round was valued at $20 million. In order to take advantage of the profitable crypto market this year, Casares and his co-founder Solal Afota rapidly expanded their team. This trend is benefiting trading platforms significantly within the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector.

Derivatives exchanges are an essential part of the cryptocurrency world for predicting token price movements. Well-known platforms like dYdX and Vertex attract significant attention and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto deposits. In contrast, Stream, which recently came out of beta testing, currently manages $5 million in total value locked.

Despite this, Casares remarked that the current state almost makes Stream financially viable. The system aims to provide depositors with opportunities in high-yield interest rate arbitrage deals, and in return, it takes a commission of 10% or more.

Over the course of discussions, Casares revealed that Stream aims to transform into a decentralized platform for perpetual swaps, going head-to-head with dYdX and other established players in DeFi derivatives, an sector barely past its fifth anniversary. He noted that many protocols prioritize reducing fees at the expense of enhancing funding rates – the returns traders must pay to bet on asset price fluctuations in the future.

“We’re focusing more on the funding rate side than the swap fees side,” he said.