In brief

  • 3Commas, a non-custodial trading platform, has raised $3 million in a Series A funding round from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
  • 3Commas, founded in 2017, claims to serve more than 100,000 active traders.
  • Alameda Research, a crypto trading shop also founded by SBF, helped facilitate the funding.

Trading tools that don’t keep custody of user assets are increasingly sought after following the rise of DeFi, and a new investment from FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried could be a big boost for one such platform.

3Commas announced today the completion of a $3 million Series A funding round, led entirely by FTX exchange founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who also founded crypto trading firm Alameda Research. 3Commas provides non-custodial access to 23 of the world’s top crypto exchanges and automated order execution based on a variety of triggers and conditional metrics. 

The investment shows how major players are making moves in the crypto industry to get involved with promising projects to support their future growth.

Estonia-based 3Commas was founded in 2017 and claims to now service more than 100,000 active traders and more than $12 billion in trading volume so far in 2020. In addition to portfolio management and trading services, 3Commas offers a variety of bots for activities like dollar cost averaging, where trades are scheduled over time to regularly accumulate an asset at a better price.

“We are delighted and equally humbled by the confidence placed in our team by our investors,” 3Commas’ founder and CEO Yuriy Sorokin said in a press release. “3Commas was built on our fundamental belief in financial inclusion and affordable access to the best trading and risk management technologies for all. This round validates our strategy and lays the groundwork for further expansion, innovation and global reach.”

Sam Bankman-Fried founded Alameda Research in 2017, and the firm now manages more than $100 million in digital assets and derivatives. SBF, as he is often called, also founded the centralized FTX derivatives exchange and is the lead developer on Serum, a platform for building DeFi applications on the Solana blockchain, as opposed to Ethereum.

DeFi, or decentralized finance, denotes a group of blockchain-based protocols that replace centralized order routing and control with automated code on decentralized networks to provide financial products and services, like loans and interest-earning deposits.

“We welcome 3Commas to our growing portfolio of strategic investments,” Bankman-Fried said in a press release. “We’re very excited to work closely with the 3Commas team. We are perfectly aligned in our mission to increase crypto adoption and offer an amazing experience utilizing 3Commas technology.”

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