June 22nd, 2020 — San Francisco: Opyn has raised $2.16mm to bring risk management to decentralized finance (DeFi), further strengthening the company’s position as the primary DeFi platform available that allows cryptocurrency investors to hedge their Ethereum (ETH) and Decentralized Finance investments through options. The financing was led by Haseeb Qureshi and Tom Schmidt at Dragonfly Capital with participation from Version One Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, 1kx, A. Capital, DTC Capital, CoinFund and angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Robert Leshner, Dylan Field, Linda Xie and more.
The company will use this funding to grow its team, make key hires, and further protocol development and security. Security is a top priority for Opyn, and Opyn’s smart contracts have been audited by OpenZeppelin, a leading consulting firm that has set the standard for secure blockchain operations. With access to additional funds, the company can continue to invest even more in the security of the protocol.
While Ethereum and Bitcoin have helped cryptocurrency enter the mainstream, these assets and others still have significant room to grow. Many see derivatives as the next logical step. In traditional finance options are a massive market, with more than $300 trillion of notional volume traded every year. These versatile instruments play a crucial role in financial insurance and hedging and generate significant premiums to those who provide protection to investors.
“As DeFi continues to grow at its current rate, a thriving options ecosystem will be an important next step for its maturation and eventual mass adoption.” — Zubin Koticha, Co-Founder and CEO of Opyn.
Opyn’s mission is to build an inclusive, fair, and open financial system. Enabling this vision requires risk management applications to protect users and offering essential infrastructure like options. Opyn was founded by Aparna Krishnan, Zubin Koticha, and Alexis Gauba in 2019. It has grown quickly, with $36mm in volume since launch and over $14.38mm in volume this past month.
In DeFi, users and projects face risks and threats including hacking, market volatility, and the fluctuating value of ETH. With Opyn, users can protect themselves from these risks with protective put options called “oTokens.” Users can also deposit collateral in a smart contract that enables them to mint and sell oTokens, earning premiums for protecting others. Finally, Opyn is non-custodial, meaning each user has sole control of their funds and assets. With Opyn, users can hedge ETH downside risk and protect their Compound deposits at opyn.co.
Opyn has built the Convexity Protocol, an open-source and decentralized options protocol that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. This protocol allows users and developers on Ethereum to create new options contracts to be used for things like financial insurance and hedging. This is a fundamental building block for DeFi and provides flexibility for developers to build on top of the protocol.
“Opyn is starting a new chapter in DeFi by unlocking options and offering a new and powerful financial primitive that brings stability to a historically-volatile market. We’ve known Alexis, Aparna, and Zubin for some time now, and have been continually impressed with their focus on solving end-user problems and shipping fast.” Said Tom Schmidt, Dragonfly Capital Partners. “Opyn is already dominating the decentralized options market, and we’re thrilled to be working with them in building a new, open financial system.”
“We couldn’t be happier to be working with Dragonfly. They’ve been extremely hands-on, helping us with the DeFi mechanism design and go to market strategy, and they even built out our first Dune Analytics dashboard!” — Zubin Koticha, Co-Founder and CEO
About Opyn: Founded in 2019 by Aparna Krishnan, Zubin Koticha, and Alexis Gauba, the company is securing decentralized finance by allowing individuals to protect DeFi deposits and hedge against Ethereum (ETH) risk. The company is based in San Francisco. For more information visit: www.opyn.co.