.webp)
June 13, 2025 – Defx, an innovative Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for high-performance perpetual futures trading, today announced it has successfully raised $2.5 million in Seed funding. This significant round saw participation from leading investors including Pantera Capital, CMT Digital, Gumi Cryptos, CoinShares, Robot Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, Baboon VC, and angel investors Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon) and Mahin Gupta (Liminal). The capital will fuel the development and expansion of Defx’s groundbreaking infrastructure, enabling a new paradigm for on-chain trading with privacy at its core.
In the current decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape, the transparency of on-chain transactions, while beneficial for verifiability, often exposes sensitive trading details such as order sizes, leverage levels, liquidation thresholds, and position direction. This transparency can lead to front-running risks, copy trading, and strategic exposure that deters serious and institutional traders.
Defx introduces a revolutionary model by integrating zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) directly into its trading engine. This allows for encrypted order flow and private "dark pool" execution, ensuring that trade intents—including size, leverage, direction, and liquidation thresholds—remain confidential.,
"In most DeFi trading systems, transaction data is fully visible onchain. While this supports transparency, it also reveals sensitive trading details like order size, leverage, and liquidation thresholds," stated Defx in their announcement. "Defx takes a different approach. By integrating zero-knowledge proofs directly into the execution layer, Defx keeps trade intent private while maintaining full verifiability onchain."
Key innovations and features of Defx include:
- Privacy-Preserving Trading: All trade inputs are encrypted, hiding PnL and liquidation points, and preventing public exposure of active positions, while maintaining verifiable fairness of execution, funding, and liquidations on-chain.
- Purpose-Built Layer 1 Architecture: Defx is a sovereign Layer 1 blockchain optimized specifically for perpetual futures. It features sub-millisecond matching via a native Central Limit Order Book (CLOB), enabling performance comparable to centralized exchanges.
- Direct Asset Onboarding: Users can directly onboard assets from major blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Base, and Berachain, eliminating the need for bridges or wrapped tokens.
- Unified Margin Engine: Supports multi-collateral, cross-margin accounts for enhanced capital efficiency.
- Vault-Based Liquidity and Passive Yield: Defx introduces a novel liquidity infrastructure where users can provide capital (BTC, ETH, stablecoins, LSTs) and earn passive yield through trading fees, protocol revenue share, and ecosystem incentives.
- Broad Asset and Collateral Support: The platform will support perpetual contracts across a wide range of markets, including cryptocurrencies, foreign exchange (FX), commodities, traditional financial indices, and synthetic products, with trades fundable by multiple collateral types.
The founding team behind Defx Labs – Darshan Bathija, Sanju Sony Kurian, and Soumyadeep Das – bring extensive experience from building Vauld, previously Asia’s largest crypto lending platform. Their insights gained from navigating the challenges of centralized platforms in 2022 have deeply informed Defx’s architecture, prioritizing risk management and sovereign, self-custodied infrastructure.
The newly secured funding will support protocol development, network security, liquidity expansion, and the onboarding of key trading and liquidity provider communities. Defx’s roadmap includes incentivized trading and points programs, competitive trading events, additional vault integrations, spot markets, embedded self-custody wallets, native fiat on/off ramps, and expansion of governance and permissionless listings. [
Defx is poised to bring dark pool mechanics on-chain, offering a privacy-first DEX with high-performance trading, real yield, and no counterparty risk, setting a new standard for on-chain derivatives.
About Defx:
Defx is a purpose-built Layer 1 blockchain designed for trading perpetual futures across crypto, FX, commodities, and synthetic markets. By combining a high-performance CLOB engine with zero-knowledge proofs and a vault-based liquidity system, Defx offers private, composable, and verifiably fair on-chain trading. The protocol enables encrypted order flow, multi-collateral margining, and native cross-chain onboarding without bridges or wrapped assets.
Compiled by CMO Intern team
