Zerion Raises $8.2M, Plans to Make DeFi Mainstream

Decentralized finance company Zerion has raised $8.2 million in a Series A funding round and plans to make the DeFi space more mainstream, the company announced Wednesday. 

Zerion helps users invest their DeFi portfolios on its platform, which contains content that customers can use to search, filter and evaluate the DeFi assets on the market, it said. 

The funding round was led by Mosaic Ventures, with participation from Placeholder, DCG, Lightspeed, Blockchain.com Ventures. 

Other investors who participated in this round include DeFi Alliance Fund, Continue Capital, SevenX Ventures, G1 Ventures, Bitscale Capital, Wintermute, The LAO and a group of angel investors from the crypto community.

With the new funds in place, Zerion said it’s focusing on scaling its infrastructure to meet demand, making multi-chain support easy to use and creating an investing experience fit for non-crypto natives. 

The DeFi community has grown substantially in the past year as curious investors and new companies continue to break into the space. As new products, coins and systems enter the marketplace, the market capitalization has skyrocketed from previous years. 

In general, the DeFi total market capitalization spiked about 556% higher earlier this year from $21.903 billion on January 1 to an all-time high of about $143.682 billion on May 11, according to data from CoinGecko. More recently, the total market cap value for DeFi has fallen from the May peak to $78.886 billion but is still up 981.7% from the year-ago date. 

With that said, DeFi’s potential still remains largely untapped by mainstream audiences because the world has never seen financial interoperability at this scale and most of DeFi remains too complex to access, said Zerion CEO Evgeny Yurtaev in a blog post. 

The company, founded in 2016, operates under the belief that anyone with a smartphone should have access to financial services. Zerion is hoping to make DeFi more accessible to all investors, regardless of their crypto knowledge or experience, Yurtaev said. 

Zerion’s interface has over 200,000 monthly users from more than 150 countries. It has processed over $600 million transaction volumes year to date, he said. 

“We saw early on that an internet-scale financial revolution cannot happen without internet-scale infrastructure that is permissionless, borderless, programmable and composable. DeFi is all of these things, and more,” Yurtaev said. 

Without bankers as gatekeepers, DeFi users globally can access open lending platforms and “earn passive income on their digital assets through lending, staking and accruing yields that are virtually unheard of in a traditional savings account,” Yurtaev said. 

In the future, the company hopes that it becomes the all-inclusive portal to the world of DeFi, the way Google provides information or Amazon provides consumers access to a plethora of goods, Yurtaev said. 

“…DeFi is creating an entirely new alternative financial ecosystem and Zerion enables millions of users to easily and transparently interact with it,” said Toby Coppel, co-founder and partner at Mosaic Ventures.

The DeFi space is volatile and rapidly growing, but “only those who provide real value will see the upside of the market in all its forms — bear or bull. We’re in this for the long haul and token prices don’t change that,” Yurtaev said.