C3, a next-generation self-custodial exchange, today announced a $6 million seed funding round led by Two Sigma Ventures, the venture capital arm of New York-based quantitative hedge fund, Two Sigma. Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Flow Traders, Jump, DRW’s Cumberland, Golden Tree, CMS Holdings, AlphaLab Capital, and C² Ventures also participated in the round.
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C3 is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange designed to bring the digital asset industry in closer alignment with the original vision of an open and trustless financial system, offering a self-custodial platform that is as performant and accessible as centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. Crypto and blockchain technology emerged as a system promising transparency, security, and true ownership, while seeking to avoid past failures of traditional finance. However, the current state of the market has strayed from these principles – the past year revealed crypto’s massive problem with opacity of its market structure from the collapse of major exchanges to the insolvency of yield platforms.
“In the wake of this heightened uncertainty and anxiety, there is an opportunity for new entrants to build a more reliable, self-custodial approach to trading leveraging the fundamental innovations of blockchain technology,” said Michel Dahdah, co-founder of C3. “It is clear that the current market structure of cryptocurrency assets is far from where it needs to be to onboard billions of users, let alone completely replace traditional financial markets.”
With C3’s unique self-custodial model, traders can employ a trustless way to trade cryptocurrencies, while avoiding many of the insolvency risks that crippled the crypto space. The platform gives investors the freedom to choose how they want to custody their funds, either through a wide range of non-custodial wallets covering multiple blockchains or by using their preferred custodian. This is a major differentiator from traditional exchange platforms, which safeguard user assets in-house, leaving traders with unknown counterparty risks.
“For many years, we saw the bundling of many services (e.g., custody, settlement, lending, etc.) into a handful of centralized intermediaries. In the years to come, we believe the crypto market structure will begin to look like many TradFi analogs, in that customer’s funds will sit in siloes where the owners prefer, and critical market functions will be segregated across many separate providers,” said Andy Kangpan, principal at Two Sigma Ventures. “C3 represents a major step in this direction by offering a clear separation of custody from exchange, without traders having to sacrifice on performance or pricing.”
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