Wintermute Announces $20M Fund To Bootstrap Polygon Dapp Development

The first funded project is Router Protocol, a crosschain messaging protocol that aims to build infrastructure enabling seamless communication between various blockchains.

Wintermute, a leading digital asset market maker, and Polygon, an Ethereum scaling platform onboarding millions to the Web3, have today announced a strategic partnership to grow the Polygon ecosystem. Wintermute is launching a $20 million fund as part of this initiative.

The fund aims to support innovative projects utilizing Polygon’s blockchain network to bolster growth and innovation within the Polygon thriving ecosystem of decentralized applications (dapps). As well as funding, Wintermute will facilitate development support, liquidity provision, support for exchange listings, and advice on business strategy.

Wintermute was an early investor in a number of active projects on Polygon, and has been operating on Polygon since early 2021, trading over $500 million a month across its multiple decentralized exchanges (DEXs). In addition to procuring financial backing for early-stage projects, Wintermute will provide support by co-developing, integrating with protocols, and providing liquidity for the protocols’ native tokens. Wintermute is already in conversations with several Polygon projects. 

“This partnership is a natural progression for our relationship with Polygon,” said Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute. “This program is well-aligned with our dedicated effort to integrate with the most promising protocols on Polygon.

“Being exclusive market makers for dozens of coins, we operate very closely within the blockchain ecosystem. We see a lot of exciting new projects on Polygon that we will be proud to support,” Gaevoy added. 

Polygon is home to multiple DeFi bluechip dapps, including Sushiswap, Curve, Aave, Balancer, and Kyber. The network also hosts the majority of today’s biggest Web 3.0 games and NFT projects, including Decentraland, Opensea, Sandbox, Somnium Space, Decentral Games. 

Arjun Kalsy, VP Growth at Polygon, said: “Polygon has become the de-facto platform for Web 3 development, and we want to ensure that we create the best enablers for entrepreneurs looking to build web3 businesses. Along with Wintermute, we’re aiming our fund at innovative developers who can leverage Polygon’s scale to open doors to millions of potential users. What those users get is access to Polygon’s low-cost & high-performance infrastructure while benefiting from the security, fundamentals, and decentralization offered by the Ethereum network.”

The first project to receive funding is Router Protocol. Router is building foundational infrastructure that enables various EVM and non-EVM chains to communicate with each other. Cross-blockchain communication will significantly enhance capital efficiency by unlocking capital flows across multiple blockchains and opening up a whole new range of multi-chain dapps.

Ramani Ramachandran, CEO of Router Protocol, said: “We have had a long-standing association with Polygon; Router was the first protocol on any chain to offer instant, gasless trading — taking advantage of Polygon’s speed and low transaction costs. Now, we’re excited to have both Polygon and Wintermute as investors in Router’s current round as we build out critical cross-chain communication infrastructure, which is launching first between Polygon and Ethereum before expanding to other chains.”

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About Wintermute

Wintermute is a leading global algorithmic trading firm in digital assets. Wintermute provides liquidity algorithmically across over 50 centralised and decentralised exchanges and facilitates OTC trading for over 200 tokens. Being a very active player in the ecosystem, the company supports a number of high-profile blockchain projects. At Wintermute, we believe in decentralization of finance. We are convinced that trading companies of the future are technology companies, not financial services providers.

Wintermute was founded in 2017 and is backed by Lightspeed, Pantera Capital, Sino Global Capital, Blockchain.com Ventures, Avon Ventures by Fidelity Investments, DeFi Alliance and other top tier investors.

About Router Protocol

Router Protocol - Router is building foundational infrastructure that enables various L1/L2, EVM and non-EVM chains to communicate with each other. Cross blockchain communication will significantly enhance capital efficiency by unlocking capital flows across multiple blockchains, and opens up a whole new range of multi chain Dapps across trading, lending, governance etc across both fungible tokens as well as NFTs.