The on-chain automated market maker DODO has attracted investments from some big names in the crypto industry for its private sale funding round.
Following the announcement of its Initial DODO Offering (IDO) on Sept 29, the exchange and DeFi DAO has unveiled a raft of industry heavyweights looking to invest in the platform.
DODO is another on-chain automated market maker that was announced in mid-August. It claims to be ‘proactive’ and more advanced than regular decentralized exchanges (DEX) such as Uniswap as it responds to changing markets and liquidity constraints in real-time.
With the latest announcement though, it cannot really claim to be ‘decentralized’ if it becomes backed by venture capital firms which will no doubt have the majority of the voting power on the protocol’s direction.
VC Giants Banking on DODO
According to the recent announcement, the $5 million private sale funding round was jointly led by Pantera Capital, Three Arrows Capital, and Binance Labs.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was quick to plug his company’s own Smart Chain on which DODO runs:
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1315848008689360897
Coinbase Ventures and Galaxy Digital joined the seed round along with investors Framework Ventures and DeFiance Capital. Other institutional investors include trading firms CMS Holdings and Alameda Research which have contributed alongside VCs Distributed Global, Primitive Ventures, D1 Ventures, IOSG Ventures, and LongHash Ventures. The announcement added;
“We are honored to be backed by the leading institutional investors, and we are also delighted to receive continuous support from our seed investors.”
DODO also updated its roadmap adding that it has just begun and that the true potential of its proactive market maker (PMM) algorithm has yet to be fully unlocked. Although, the exchange needs to foster organic trade volume to get the kind of liquidity that other large DEXs and CEXs have.
In order to do this, it aims to optimize price oracles, implement smart routing to enable traders to swap between pairs, and create customizable on-chain strategies for institutional market makers.
Into 2021 the DODO team aims to launch a new portal and user interface and introduce permissionless market-making strategies on-chain.
DODO TVL and Price Update
The total value locked on the DODO exchange has just surpassed $100 million according to DeFi Pulse. It slumped at the end of September to $18 million but has made a big recovery and is currently ranked number 15 on the TVL charts.
DODO prices have surged following the announcement from a daily low of $0.58 to $0.64 at the time of press. The ERC-20 DODO token went live on the exchange in a USDT pair at an initial offering price of $0.10 and peaked at $0.68 on Oct 6.