CowDAO Raises $23M From Private Investors and its Community

GnosisDAO offshoot, CowDAO has announced the successful raise of $23 million from both its private investors and more than 5000 of its community members.

As the platform revealed, the fundraising was backed by 1kx, Delphi Ventures, Dialectic, Blockchain Capital, Cherry Ventures, Collider Ventures, Ethereal Ventures, Longhash Ventures, the LAO, Robot Ventures, SevenX Ventures, imToken Ventures, 0x Labs, Atka, Kronos, Profluent, mgnr, Protofire, DystopiaLabs, P2P, HackVC, and Prycto among others.

According to CoWDAO, the funding will be used to develop the CoW Protocol, in boosting its marketing plans, hire additional talent, and fuel the project’s expansion into new chains where MEV protection is most needed.

“We envision CoW Protocol becoming the core settlement layer for decentralized trading across Web3. Through CoW Protocol’s batch auctions, traders can achieve significantly better prices by being able to trade P2P, co-share execution costs, and avoid value extractions of rent-seeking third parties. These price benefits grow exponentially with an increasing user base, which we hope to bootstrap with help of the COW governance token” says Anna George, Product lead at CoW Protocol.

The CoW Protocol is being designed to serve as a liquidity or price finding layer in a wide range of EVM chains. The CoW Protocol hopes to give DeFi traders a good exchange rate when sourcing liquidity by leveraging its batch settlement layer built on top of Automated Market Makers (AMMs) and Decentralized Exchange (DEX) Aggregators.

As a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, CoWDAO showcases the strength of its decentralization design as a total of 50.2% of the investment options allocated to traders in the Gnosis Chain are being exercised. Per the broad-based participation received through the funding, no one investor controls more than 1% of the total CoW tokens, except for GnosisDAO.

CoWDAO Funding Affirms New Era for Venture Capital Backing

Funding for blockchain and decentralized finance protocols is growing at a very fast pace as venture capital firms seek avenues to become an integral part of the future that these innovative platforms wield. From the $100 million funding received by Greenidge Generation to the $9 million raised by The TIE, a new era of capital injection has been finally ushered into the nascent crypto world.

The broad-based nature of the backers secured by the CoWDAO protocol is evidence that the startup is also on track for big milestones in the growing DeFi ecosystem.