Reef Finance Raises $3.9M for Cross-Chain DeFi on Polkadot

As the limitations and costs of running decentralized finance (DeFi) apps on Ethereum continue to ride high, a growing list of projects are lining up on competing blockchains.

Adding to this trend, Polkadot-based Reef Finance has closed a $3.9 million seed funding round for its cross-chain suite of DeFi services, the company announced Wednesday. Included in the round were NGC Ventures, AU21 Capital, QCP Capital, Kenetic Capital and Woodstock Fund.

Reef aims to solve the high technical barrier investors face when attempting to participate in DeFi, said Reef Finance CEO Denko Manceski, not to mention doing away with gas fees on Ethereum that are currently running at near-record highs.

“The average retail investor entering the DeFi landscape is confused,” said Manceski. “They don’t know the names of the projects or how to keep up with the best strategies and stay safe and well-diversified. They have to go through, like, five different websites and use different [user interfaces] made by different vendors. It’s overwhelming. And while you do this, you’re missing out on different opportunities.”

To remove the headache from a typical DeFi user experience, Reef offers a kind of one-stop shop, combining a global liquidity aggregator, yield farming aggregator and asset-management product, said Manceski.

So far, Reef has partnered with Polkadot projects like Plasm, a dapp platform on Substrate; and Crust Network, an incentive layer for decentralized storage. The company said it also plans to integrate with leading oracle service providers including Chainlink and Bluzelle. 

“The Holy Grail of decentralized asset exchange is seamless interoperable movement of assets along the paths of least resistance, and Reef is attempting to address this challenge by building on top of Polkadot,” Kenetic Capital partner Jehan Chu said in a statement.