Cega Raises $4.3 Million seed round to Build DeFi derivatives
According to data from Dune Analytics, approximately 4 million-plus people worldwide have invested in DeFi products and DeFi ecosystem is worth over $200 billion (at the writing of this). DeFi market is evolving rapidly, mimicking complex financial products, similar to those in the traditional finance sphere.
Cega, a new protocol founded by former UBS derivatives trader Arisa Toyosaki, is now creating a new category within DeFi, exotic derivatives.
“When the market moves 10%, as a user that is staking into these products, you’re actually sometimes losing your principal. I wanted to think of something that creates that high yield that derivative products and crypto still create, but is also safer, and that’s how I thought of Cega,” Toyosaki said.
Toyosaki has been in the crypto space since 2016, even during her stint at UBS in Hong Kong, when contemplated launching a crypto derivatives platform, but dropped it. She revisited the idea in 2020 during “DeFi summer,” when decentralized finance started to take off.
Cega, founded in 2020, has now raised $4.3 million seed round led by Dragonfly Capital Partners, Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Solana Ventures and others, valuing the firm at $60 million.
Toyosaki is excited by the opportunity to build a community around Cega, which takes place on the project’s Discord chat, according Cega co-founder and marketing head Winston Zhang.
“We want the experts in the space to coalesce around the project and really get engaged with the project, because there will be lots of ways for them to, as a community, influence the types of products that we launch and influence the direction that we go in,” Zhang said. “We want to really have the community be a strong voice, and sort of grow that by word-of-mouth.”
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