Uniswap Labs, the corporate behind the favored decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, has launched a enterprise capital arm to spend money on web3 tasks.
Uniswap Labs Ventures, the brand new division, will spend money on firms throughout varied phases and areas inside web3, from infrastructure to developer instruments and consumer-facing purposes, in line with the corporate. Investments might be made immediately from the corporate’s steadiness sheet, The Block first reported, although the corporate didn’t share any particulars on how massive these checks might be or how a lot steadiness sheet capital might be devoted to the fund.
The agency is tapping Matteo Leibowitz to go up the enterprise arm alongside Uniswap’s chief working officer, Mary-Catherine Lader. Leibowitz beforehand labored at Uniswap as a technique lead beginning in August 2020, and previous to that, was a analysis analyst at The Block for almost two years, according to Linkedin.
Earlier than launching this devoted enterprise arm, Uniswap invested in 11 firms and protocols throughout the web3 ecosystem, together with Tenderly, LayerZero, MakerDAO, Aave, Compound Protocol and PartyDAO, the corporate says. The Ethereum-native trade seems to have largely backed different firms which might be additionally within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Its new ventures crew plans to play an energetic function in on and off-chain governance “when related,” it says. It has particularly introduced plans to take part within the governance techniques of MakerDAO, Aave, Compound and Ethereum Identify Service (ENS) up to now.
The information comes a couple of week after a class-action lawsuit was filed towards Uniswap Labs, in addition to its founder and its personal backers — Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Union Sq. Ventures — for allegedly participating in rampant fraud” on the trade. Uniswap Labs most not too long ago raised $11 million in a Sequence A spherical in August 2020, which a16z led.
Uniswap joins a rising section of crypto-native firms now formally dedicating assets to investing in different firms within the area, together with crypto exchange FTX and DeFi protocol Cake, which each not too long ago launched enterprise funds. Firms like Uniswap, which have already got expertise constructing in web3, can apply their experience and classes realized to different areas of the crypto market by means of their early-stage investments, DeFi researcher Ryan Rasmussen of Bitwise Asset Administration wrote in a tweet.
The decentralized trade is the fifth-largest in DeFi by Total Value Locked (TVL), a metric that represents the scale of the belongings on the protocol, according to blockchain data provider DeFi Pulse. It had $7.04 billion in TVL, round half that of the main DeFi platform, Maker, as of April 11, DeFi Pulse exhibits.
A spokesperson for Uniswap instructed TechCrunch that the broader pattern of web3 firms making enterprise investments represents their want to collaborate slightly than compete with each other.
