We are very happy to announce our seed investment into Defined, a programmable data platform for decentralized finance (DeFi). We led the $2.5m round with participation from Mark Cuban, Balaji Srinivasan, Tiny Capital, Compound, Inflection, Portico Ventures, Capital 6, Rasool Rayani, and Kamunting Street Capital. We have been active investors in DeFi for almost three years now, with investments in Uniswap, Opyn and Nexus Mutual, and are thrilled to be adding Defined to our portfolio. 

The DeFi movement is re-building the financial system in a decentralized way…money lego block by money lego block. In this process, hundreds of native tokens have been launched that represent governance and/or economic rights in those protocols that power DeFi. This has led to pretty sizable outcomes: Uniswap’s native token UNI currently has a market cap of over $20B.

Given that crypto is still in its infancy and that we will continue to see the tokenization of everything in the decades to come, it’s harder than ever for investors and traders to make sense of the token ecosystems. The thousands of existing tokens, plus dozens of new ones launched every day, as well as the various centralized and decentralized exchanges that they are traded at, create an enormous amount of data and complexity. 

This is where Defined comes in. Defined is the brainchild of Mike Rowe, who started trading DeFi tokens in September 2020 and quickly realized that a professional investor needs to use nearly a dozen different tools to find all the data they need. In addition, existing solutions are often slow and rely on third-party APIs that occasionally go offline or don’t even work at all!

Defined is solving all of this. It’s built from the ground up using its own blockchain nodes – this creates extremely fast and reliable data. Data on Defined is updated as soon as blocks are mined, so you don’t have to worry about waiting upwards of one minute after an event happens for new data to appear.

While Defined is currently most useful as a DeFi data platform, their long-term mission is to make this data programmable – it will be interesting to see what kind of tools DeFi traders will create on top of the platform, from automated trading strategies to better reporting and charting tools. Such a rich ecosystem of community-driven tools will be key to unlocking the next level of growth and maturity for DeFi.

For more information on Defined, check out their Twitter or visit the Defined website.