The wave of innovation and investment that was “DeFi summer,” the mainstreaming of NFTs, and continued inflows of users and capital all speak to the broadening resonance of the crypto value prop.
Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of chains, thousands of new tokens, and continued innovation in DEXs, wallets, and other decentralized apps.
But as the “Decentralized Economy” has grown to several trillion dollars in size, this decentralized innovation has also caused liquidity fragmentation, making exchange of value less efficient and more complex.
0x is the antidote to this challenge. The open 0x Protocol powers the exchange of tokenized value for a massive and growing ecosystem of leading applications unlocking easy access to multi-chain liquidity and improving markets for everyone. 0x API aggregates liquidity and abstracts the complexity of routing orders across exchanges and market makers while optimizing price, gas fees, slippage, and reverts so that developers and users don’t have to.
To date, 0x has enabled over $158B in tokenized value to flow across 43M+ trades. 0x has integrations across all of the top wallets and apps: including MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet and Coinbase NFT, Polygon Wallet, Brave, Matcha, dYdX, Zapper, Zerion and Shapeshift. 0x is the trusted, trustless standard for decentralized exchange. This is an extremely powerful public good.
That’s why we are leading the $70M Series B in 0x Labs, architect of Web3’s core exchange infrastructure, and Sarah will be joining the board. Developers and businesses can use 0x to easily incorporate exchange functionality into their applications and create new markets for all tokenized assets, including cryptocurrencies, DeFi tokens, and NFTs.
We are impressed by the rapid growth and market-leading positions of 0x API and Matcha, products that 0x Labs built on top of 0x Protocol for businesses and consumers. We’re especially bullish on their expansion to NFTs and multi-chain over the past year. We’re excited by their enablement of “traditional finance” companies expanding into crypto, whom we believe are key partners in onboarding the next 100M users into Web3.
At Greylock, we especially love to back companies that arm the builders: developers and entrepreneurs. 0x Labs is one of these companies. While some may believe that decentralization of exchange is infeasible and users will gravitate to a small handful of already-leading exchanges and wallets, we take the opposite view. We believe we’re at the very early innings of re-building our financial infrastructure on new rails, where the minimum future trading volume encapsulates all existing traditional financial assets, and the expected end state includes an ownership economy across social networks, games, other real world assets, and more.
In 2021, over $1 trillion was exchanged on decentralized exchanges and $14 trillion was exchanged on centralized exchanges. We at Greylock expect this gap will narrow, as activity transitions from short-term speculation to owning and using their assets through non-custodial wallets and transacting through more decentralized exchanges and applications. Liquidity (through 0x!) and improved product experiences in the decentralized economy are prerequisites for this future. Decentralization doesn’t come for free – but it is worthwhile and it depends on the quality of the standards and primitives that we as a community build.
Most importantly, we are excited to back 0x Labs co-founders Will Warren and Amir Bandeali, and the entire mission-driven, talented 0x Labs team. The 0x team have been around since the early days of Ethereum and play a significant role in the broader Web3 ecosystem. Will and Amir encapsulate long term, positive sum thinking – this philosophy is represented in 0x – as it succeeds as the entire ecosystem grows and better serves users.
We are grateful to be part of the 0x community and hope you will join us. If you’re a developer, check out 0x API. If you’re an investor or trader, check out Matcha. And if you want to join the mission, 0x Labs is hiring.
