Paradigm Raises Seed Round Led by Polychain Capital for Relay Protocol

Polychain Capital, Dragonfly Capital, and Chapter One back Paradigm. We’re hiring.

I am excited to announce that Paradigm has raised an equity seed round led by Polychain Capital with participation from Dragonfly Capital and Chapter One. The entire team and I are grateful to be backed by partners that share our vision of open, borderless and efficient global markets. We echo the sentiment that ideas are cheap; execution is everything. We look forward to leveraging the strategic insight and additional resources of our investors as we continue to develop Paradigm.

The investment will allow us to expand the development of our core protocol and infrastructure. These efforts include:

Expanding our engineering team with talented and passionate individuals that share our values and are excited by our mission.

Supporting community and 3rd party code audits to ensure security and consistency within our codebase.

Attending developer conferences and hackathons to accelerate the adoption of our protocol and receive feedback from core users and developers.

Developing an open-source legal framework to guide matchers built on our platform towards regulatory compliance.

Establishing a headquarters in Oakland, California.

About us:

Paradigm’s mission is to create open, borderless, and efficient global markets.

To do this, we’re building a protocol that transfers the roles of order relay and liquidity management from centralized venues to a decentralized network, establishing a global market with unified liquidity.

In 2017, the 0x Project introduced an open protocol for decentralized exchange. Their protocol, which has since become the de facto exchange primitive, is ‘hybrid decentralized’ in architecture. This means that order relay (broadcast and discovery) occurs off-chain while settlement processes remain on-chain.

More specifically, 0x defined a system in which a pipeline of publicly accessible Ethereum smart contracts facilitate the wallet-to-wallet exchange of funds. This model leaves the roles of order broadcast and discovery up to 3rd party, off-chain systems called relayers. Relayers are responsible for sourcing and maintaining liquidity in the form of signed order messages. This architecture removes the friction and security risk of centralized custodial parties while maintaining the performance and structure necessary to support liquid, interoperable markets.

With Paradigm’s system, it becomes possible to not only settle, but to also relay orders in a completely decentralized manner. To do this, the Paradigm Protocol transfers the roles of order relay and liquidity management from centralized venues to a performant decentralized network positioned one layer above existing hybrid decentralized settlement protocols. Tailored exchange interfaces and matching engines can be built on top of this network, effectively sharing liquidity.

Our solution aims to iterate on the existing hybrid decentralized settlement model. Our protocol unifies liquidity that is currently fragmented across centralized relayers by providing a generalized relay protocol for orders of token-based financial instrumentation (such as options and loans). Paradigm’s generalized protocol makes it easier for third parties to build and trade sophisticated financial instruments while creating a more efficient and accessible market structure.

It is just the beginning for Paradigm, but we couldn’t be more excited to join the talented teams building the decentralized financial system of tomorrow. Our team is committed to openly communicating our plans and will be developing our protocol completely open-source. We hope to encourage diverse participation on our GitHub and plan to release contribution guidelines soon. You can learn more about Paradigm and follow our progress by checking out our whitepaper, subscribing to our subreddit, following us on Twitter and joining our chat. We look forward to seeing you there.

We’re hiring!

We are actively looking to hire new positions including a Distributed Systems Engineer as well as Full Stack (Web3) Engineer. If you are interested in getting involved with our project, please reach out to info@paradigm.market.