Arbelos Markets, a crypto trading firm, has successfully raised $28 million in an investment round that was oversubscribed. The fundraising campaign included seed equity and debt financing, with Dragonfly Capital, a crypto venture capital firm, leading the participation. Other investors that joined the round include Room40 Ventures, Selini Capital, Breed VC, FalconX, Circle Ventures, Paxos, P2 Ventures, Deribit, Chorus One, StarkWare, and Immutable. Angel investors from Aevo, Cega, Talos, Amberdata, and Framework also contributed to the investment.
The investment comes at a time when the digital asset industry is recovering from the crypto credit crisis in 2022, which resulted in the downfall of companies like BlockFi, Celsius, and Three Arrows Capital. As the asset class matures, more traditional players are entering the market, transforming it into one that resembles traditional financial markets. Arbelos Markets aims to fill the void left by the previous market turmoil by catering to sophisticated investors’ liquidity and hedging requirements through crypto derivatives and options.
Before establishing Arbelos in late 2023, Shiliang Tang served as the chief investment officer at LedgerPrime, a quantitative digital asset investment firm. Joshua Lim, on the other hand, held positions at Galaxy and Genesis, where he served as the head of trading strategy and head of derivatives, respectively.
Lim believes that the lack of transparency played a crucial role in the crypto credit crisis. Some firms presented outdated or fabricated financial reports, hiding the true risks from their creditors. Arbelos aims to address this issue by introducing a “transparency engine” that allows clients to independently verify the company’s risk profile, balance sheet, and counterparty exposure in real-time.
Arbelos is one of the largest options block liquidity providers and actively operates in centralized and on-chain derivatives and options marketplaces. Since its inception, the firm has achieved a derivatives trading volume of over $25 billion in notional value within the first six months.
The crypto venture capital funding has exceeded $1 billion for the second month in a row, indicating continued investor interest in the industry. In the first quarter of 2024, Web3 startups secured just under $1.9 billion in funding across 346 deals.