Crypto Exchange Uniswap Labs Raises $165M in Polychain Capital-Led Round

Decentralized exchange Uniswap Labs raised $165 million in a Series B funding round that was led by crypto-focused investment firm Polychain Capital.

The capital will enable Uniswap to invest more in its web app and developer tools, non-fungible token (NFT) launch and move to support mobile users. Other returning investors in the round included the crypto arm of venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, SV Angel and Variant Investments.

The announcement comes a week after a Citigroup in a research note said that decentralized exchanges have grown faster than centralized exchanges over the past two years, a gap the firm expects to grow in the future as users move away from centralized exchanges because of their cumbersome know-your-customer requirements.

“As Uniswap Labs focuses on products, a much broader ecosystem continues to grow and thrive beyond what any one company can do on their own,” Hayden Adams, inventor of the Uniswap Protocol and CEO at Uniswap Labs, wrote in the announcement post.

“As an example, the governance community recently voted to create the Uniswap Foundation, which will contribute to the protocol’s decentralized development and give at least $60 million in grants to community projects over the next few years,” Adams added.

Read more: What Is Uniswap? A Complete Beginner’s Guide