Leading DeFi tracker protocol DeBank secured $25 million funds in an equity round spearheaded by US-based venture capital entity Sequoia China along with a host of several well-known crypto investment firms such as Dragonfly, Hash Global, and Youbi. The funding round also featured strategic investments from Coinbase Venture, Crypto.com, payment platform Circle, and crypto hard wallet creator Ledger.
Announcing the same via Twitter on Tuesday, the latest funding brought the wallet tracker’s total valuation to $200 million. For the uninitiated, DeBank is a cryptocurrency wallet designed to track DeFi data, including decentralized applications or exchanges [DEX] and DeFi interest rates. It also enables users to navigate and manage various decentralized assets and projects.
The platform includes analytics for Blockchain lending protocols, stablecoins, margin trading platforms, and others. DeBank was co-founded in 2018 by research and development expert Tang Hongbo who is also the Chief Executing Officer with its office based in China. As per his LinkedIn profile, the exec is based in Shanghai’s Jing’an district. Currently, the DeBank dashboard allows users to track 798 protocols across 17 chains like Ethereum [ETH], the Binance Smart Chain [BSC], Polygon [MATIC], Fantom [FTM], Avalanche [AVAX], and others as per data provided on its website.
In addition to that, six months ago, the platform announced a browser extension wallet geared towards DeFi users. The wallet called Rabby was built to switch automatically between chains, according to the blog post. The project targeted traditional MetaMask-like extension wallets which are ideal only for a single-chain scenario. Whereas, Rabby’s in-built pre-transaction risk-scanning feature aims to offer extra leverage in the highly competitive market.
As the year comes to an end, DeFi has truly evolved from the days when it was just a buzzword.
DeFi heralded a major shift in 2021
2021 has seen a major transformation from token-oriented days to a brand new DeFi oriented era with the rise of several DeFi platforms gaining mass adoption among users. Earlier in May, one of DeBank’s competitors- DeFi Dashboard Zapper announced raising $15 million in a fundraising round led by Framework Ventures, joined by Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher’s led Sound Ventures and entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Following that, in July this year, another decentralized startup Zerion too wrapped up an $8.2 million funding round to create a new alternative financial ecosystem for its users.