Parallel Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol based on Polkadot has closed a Series A funding round at $22 million.
The latest round was led by Polychain Capital with the participation of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Slow Ventures, Alameda Research, Blockchain Capital, CMT Digital, Blockchange Ventures, and other investors.
This equity round values the project at $150 million. To date, Parallel Finance has raised a total of $24 million. Founded five months ago by Yubo Ruan, Parallel Finance is currently being tested on both Polkadot and Kusama.
The protocol focuses on two key services, including leverage staking and liquidity mining.
Leverage staking allows users to borrow their staking collateral to grow their yield while they can stake their Polkadot (DOT) tokens to receive native tokens of Parallel through liquidity mining.
According to Yubo Ruan, founder of Parallel Finance, the company was set to launch its mainnet in the fourth quarter of this year, and to achieve this, it also looked to expand its current workforce of 20 people by hiring engineers.
The founder added that the company plans to raise more funds to be able to conduct more strategies in the future, “After we have TVL (total value locked) traction, we will do another round,” he said.
Currently, Parallel has appealed to 3,000 users. In addition, it is planning to grow new users by 10,000 within six months and over 50,000 users within a year.
The protocol company is also looking to participate in Polkadot and Kusama crowd auctions as projects need to win a crowd loan in order to launch a parachain on Polkadot’s mainnet.
Ruan commented that there are only 100 parachain slots available on the Polkadot network currently. That means only 100 projects can operate on the main network until further notice, and the crowd loan is the only way currently for new parachains to connect to the Polkadot network.
