1kx and Spartan Group co-lead $4MM round for DeFi options protocol SIREN Markets

March 1, 2021 — SIREN Markets has raised $4MM to bring sophisticated, fully-composable cryptocurrency options trading to Decentralized Finance. The financing was co-led by 1kx and Spartan Group. Additional participation came from from CMS Holdings, Blockfolio Founder Edward Moncada, Naval Ravikant, Robert Leshner and Tarun Chitra’s Robot Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, WikiHow Founder Jack Herrick, Santiago R Santos from ParaFi Capital, and more.

SIREN previously raised $1.2MM in December 2020 from Spartan Group, CMS Holdings, QCP, Robot Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Edward Moncada, Dialectic, and more.

Goals for the capital raised in this round include security auditing and expanding the team to accommodate an ambitious project roadmap for 2021. SIREN is focused on bringing the user experience and features expected in traditional finance to the less-developed Decentralized-Finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

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Cryptocurrency has become more attractive as an asset class over time, with firms such as Tesla publicly announcing support for Bitcoin transactions and holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet; as cryptocurrency rises in popularity, people have demonstrated an increased appetite to interact with the DeFi ecosystem in ways that model more traditional centralized finance — trading assets, staking tokens to farm rewards similar to an annuity or bond, and more. However, there has not previously been a high-quality decentralized solution for cryptocurrency options trading that offers the features of a traditional finance platform.

Options are an asset with a large market in traditional finance, with more than $300 trillion of notional volume traded every year. Options play a crucial role in allowing investors to hedge their positions, multiply their holding via multi-option spreads, and more effectively match a portfolio to a model of potential future market volatility. Sophisticated traders expect to be able to construct complex portfolio positions and to move in and out of the long and short sides of options at will. SIREN is currently the only DeFi platform that allows for this level of flexibility and composability of assets and their derivatives.

“Options are a massive financial primitive, and we’re excited to support the SIREN team in bringing them to composable, programmable DeFi. While we see 1:1 mappings of existing financial primitives on blockchains, we think the real opportunities exist when teams use smart contracts’ unique abilities to solve core challenges, which in the case of options is liquidity.” said Lasse Clausen of 1kx.

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The product roadmap for SIREN in 2021 includes expanding into options for cryptocurrency assets not currently supported by other platforms, such as SUSHI, UNI, and YFI; natively allowing for creation of multi-options spreads, cash settlement rather than physical settlement, and more.

SIREN Markets is currently in beta with over $14MM of Total Value Locked in its liquidity pools and supports options for wBTC and SUSHI. SIREN expects to launch its mainnet the week of March 1, 2021

For more information on SIREN visit sirenmarkets.com.

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