Cardano-based DEX WingRiders secures $4.5m seed funding

WingRiders, an exchange platform that leverages the benefits of Cardano to correct the issues plaguing DEXs on Ethereum, secured $4.5m seed funding in a round led by high-profile investors.

The first round of investors are cFund (lead), Spartan Group, Coti, and Longhash.

Earlier this month, Ethereum recorded very slow transactions and a spike in gas fees due to a massive uptick in the number of users playing an NFT game on Polygon called Sunflower Farmers.

The explosion in popularity of NFTs has led to the regular clogging up of Ethereum, the most popular blockchain for NFT projects.

These disruptions take the form of gas fees that are constantly in flux, leading to troubles with scalability, and slower transaction speeds as more computing energy is required to handle the increased workload. On other third-generation blockchains like Cardano and Solana, however, this does not yet appear to be an issue.

WingRiders exchange platform has, therefore, decided to leverage the benefits of Cardano to correct the issues plaguing DEXs on Ethereum by avoiding the obstacles that slow down both Ethereum-based DEXs and recent entrants into the Cardano space such as high gas fees and failed transactions.

The company said it is offering full privacy to its investors and only requires users to connect a lightweight non-custodial NuFi wallet to buy and trade tokens; the entire exchange can run within one’s browser.

Traders on WingRiders are also able to earn interest on crypto through staking.

Dave Roebuck, Wave Financial’s Principal commented that when seeing the potential of WingRiders, coupled with its deep technical expertise and strong team, “we felt that it was a great fit for cFund and would add to the furtherment of the Cardano DeFi ecosystem”.

“We are looking forward to a bright and successful future not only for Wingriders but for Cardano as a whole,” he said.

Kelvin Koh, Spartan Group’s co-founder and CIO, added the company sees WingRiders as one of the strongest early players in the Cardano DeFi ecosystem.

“The team has a very strong technical background and we are excited to be supporting them in their vision to build out a core DeFi infrastructure primitive on Cardano,” he said.

Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano recently said he is looking forward to this project and added he was “pretty pleased” with Cardano’s progress as well.