In brief
- The DeFi space is complex and difficult to break into.
- Newcomers struggle understanding where to begin amidst an ever-growing list of tokens and protocols.
- Reef Finance aims to use the funds from its seed funding round to support the mainstreaming of this industry.
Liquidity aggregator Reef Finance has completed a seed funding round of $3.9 million. These funds will be used to support the company’s goal making decentralized finance (DeFi) more accessible to newcomers.
Reef Finance allows users to trade on centralized and decentralized exchanges, with support for multiple blockchain platforms. The DeFi protocol runs on top of Polkadot, and allows users to lend, borrow, stake and mine their assets—and earn rewards for doing so. But crucially, it wants to provide a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to experiment with DeFi.
“Reef was born from the current problems in the DeFi landscape,” Denko Mancheski, CEO at Reef Finance, told Decrypt.
“New users don’t know the names of projects, when they come into the landscape, they don’t know exactly what they have to learn, it’s overwhelming for them,” he added.
One of the biggest issues in the DeFi space today is how complicated it is for newcomers. An endless array of tokens and protocols make it difficult for prospective users to know where to begin.
“You have to go to like five different websites, learn how to use them, and the landscape is moving super fast, so everyday something new shows up,” Mancheski said.
Reef Finance’s goal is to make it much easier for anyone to access this nascent industry and to try some of the experimental projects and tokens on offer.
“Our job as a global development community is to abstract away complexities,” Mancheski said, adding that “from a technical point of view, we’re moving towards being able to onboard a simple non-tech savvy user.”
However, since the majority of DeFi runs on Ethereum, a fact that’s partially responsible for its high transaction fees, Reef Finance will integrate with all of its protocols. But it wants to provide much wider access to DeFi ecosystems on other blockchains—and create a truly decentralized ecosystem.