Synthetic asset protocol for Polygon raises $1.5M from major investors

Polysynth aims to support trading for 100,000 different synthetic tokenized assets through its “virtual market maker” protocol.

Polysynth, a Polygon-based synthetic asset platform, has secured investments from a number of DeFi venture capital firms and angel investors.

The team announced a $1.5 million funding round as part of its seed round on Monday, revealing participation from Jump Capital, DeFi Alliance, Hashed and a number of individuals such as Alan Howard, co-founder of Brevan Howard Asset Management. and Polygon’s co-founders Sandeep Nailwal and Jaynti Kanani.

Polysynth stated that it would be using the funding to expand its team of engineers, designers and marketers, in addition to carrying out security audits for the protocol.

The platform is currently in beta, testing just a handful of assets including BTC, ETH, and MATIC perpetual futures. When live on mainnet, the protocol aims to build out derivatives for 100,000 different mainstream and crypto financial assets.

Polysynth will offer a scalable virtual market maker (VMM), which the team claims to offer several advantages over a traditional order book or automated market maker (AMM).

A VMM does not use the collateralized debt position (CDP) model typically employed by automated market makers. Instead, traders use stablecoins as collateral to open long or short positions for each synthetic asset. They can access the liquidity and other benefits, such as low slippage and better quotes, by supplying stablecoins and using those to buy and sell synthetic assets directly.

Jump Capital partner Saurabh Sharma elaborated that “Polysynyth eliminates capital inefficiency in the traditional over-collateralization approach and hence, significantly reduces the barriers for mass adoption.”

He explained that current synthetic asset solutions typically require five times the collateral and manual re-balancing, adding “Polysynth's VMM based model eliminates these challenges by allowing traders to trade against a virtual constant product curve.”

To generate usage of its beta version, the protocol is launching a trading competition on Tuesday. Users who generate the highest returns or report bugs present on the platform will be eligible for cash rewards.

PolySynth also stated its intention to form a decentralized autonomous organization and launch a governance token in the future.

Related: Polygon will create a decentralized autonomous organization

According to DeFiLlama, there is currently $4.92 billion locked across the Polygon ecosystem. The network provides second-layer scalability for Ethereum.

Multi-chain liquidity protocol Aave has the largest market share on Polygon with $1.87 billion in total value locked, representing 38% of the network’s total. Other popular protocols running on Polygon include SushiSwap, Curve Finance and Balancer.

Last Friday, Polygon deployed fiat on-ramps via Alchemy Pay in a move that ushered in the first direct fiat payments for DeFi.