Cega Finance is pleased to announce that it closed a $5 million funding round led by Dragonfly Capital with continued participation from Pantera Capital and Robot Ventures (Tarun Chitra and Robert Leshner). This brings the startup’s total seed funding raised to $9.3 million.
Cega is the first protocol to create exotic options structured products on-chain and has been a leading provider of DeFi crypto structured products since its launch in June 2022. Cega’s volumes and TVL have been #1 in Solana and #4 across all chains, with the protocol kickstarting the market for exotic options with crypto underlyings. Cega has been lauded for its strong operations and risk management during the FTX crisis back in November, and has also established itself as a market leader in counterparty management. This recent fundraising was conducted to accelerate the expansion of Cega’s product catalog, develop new DeFi innovative primitives, and create a trading team for exotic derivative specialists.
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“The team is excited to create never before seen products in DeFi that are high performing and offer users strong risk-adjusted yield. We are also excited to offer the best execution in the market through a competitive in-house liquidity maker and tap into the multi-trillion dollar exotic derivatives market,” said Arisa Toyosaki, co-founder and CEO of Cega.
Cega built a decentralized application that combines basic options (e.g. call/put) with advanced options characteristics to create packaged “structured” offerings for DeFi users. Its first exotic options structured product is the fixed coupon note, which is a basket of puts with knock-in barriers. This exotic structured product benefits retail investors by offering superior yield, built-in downside protection, and compounded returns. It also benefits market makers by providing a discounted hedge for their portfolio as well as allowing proprietary gains through hedging trades.
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“Cega has created an entirely new DeFi primitive through their innovation in exotic option smart contracts that was a 0-to-1 product with strong organic traction,” said Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly Capital Partners. “The protocol has weathered the numerous blow-ups from last year without losing any funds, a testament to the team’s experience and diligence. In this same time, they’ve grown to be the #1 options protocol on Solana and one of the top derivatives protocols in the DeFi space overall. We at Dragonfly are thrilled to continue backing their vision of being the #1 DeFi derivatives protocol, and for them to bring never-before-seen products into this space.”
Cega is continuing to revolutionize the DeFi space by offering brand new capabilities to the DeFi ecosystem. With strong experience and a strong team, Cega will continue to push the boundaries of DeFi derivatives.
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