This article comes fromThe Blocksecondary title
Odaily Translator | Nian Yin Si Tang
Summary:
Summary:
- Decentralized financial platform Zerion completed $12.3 million in financing, aiming to break the pattern of encrypted wallets. Its investors include Wintermute Ventures, Mosaic, Alchemy and Placeholder.
- The startup raised $8.2 million last year and sees wallets as the basis of personal identity in Web3.
Decentralized finance platform Zerion has just closed a $12.3 million Series B funding round and is on a mission to disrupt the crypto wallet landscape. The round was led by Wintermute Ventures, with participation from Mosaic, Coinbase Ventures, Alchemy and Placeholder.
Founded in 2019, the Zerion platform enables users to access and manage assets across decentralized finance protocols. Users can connect any number of crypto wallets to the platform, and its non-custodial design means users manage their own funds.
The new funds from the Series B round will be used to further develop the wallet — leveraging advanced data and an intuitive design, the company said in a release.last year,, aiming to turn its Web3 wallet product into the primary interface for Web3.
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Crypto wallets are not ready for Web3
Zerion co-founder and CEO Evgeny Yurtaev explained to The Block that crypto wallets are now forming the basis of personal identity in Web3. However, existing wallets have not changed in terms of helping users.
"A lot of people dismiss wallets because they're purely financial in nature and have very limited functionality," he said. For some people it’s games or music.”
Yurtaev explained that Zerion hopes to solve some key problems faced by existing wallet users. This includes poor support for multiple wallets, limited security checks on transactions, limited transaction history data, etc.
What sets this wallet apart is that it is mobile-first, though the team is currently working on a desktop extension. “We started with mobile because we saw the biggest UX pain point of mobile-first — wallets on mobile are terrible,” Yurtaev said.
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Raising Series B Funding in a Bear Market
Investors in Zerion’s funding round include crypto-native investors as well as traditional investors in the venture capital space.
“We have a team of 40 people from 20 countries,” Yurtaev added. “For the funding cap table, we also wanted to experiment with different types of investors in order to gain a broader understanding of how trends in the industry are developing.”
The funds will provide about two years of operation, he added.
Wintermute, the lead investor in this round, also participated in the A round. While no formal agreement has been reached between the two companies, Yurtaev sees synergies between the companies' long-term goals.
“I think Wintermute is exploring more consumer-facing applications,” Yurtaev said. “For our part, we are exploring things around tokens and transactions, because transactions are still the largest part of Zerion’s internal transactions.”
