San Francisco, California — Portal, a cross-chain decentralized exchange on Bitcoin (BTC) facilitating atomic swaps between BTC and other crypto assets as well as a layer-two wallet solution, closed an $8.5 million funding round. The team will use this funding to build censorship-resistant and self-sovereign decentralized finance solutions on the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin is the world’s leading cryptocurrency, yet its DeFi ecosystem remains lackluster. Portal acknowledges the opportunities ahead and aims to build a solution that is self-sovereign and private. To do so, the team completed an $8.5 million funding round with the help of various prominent investors in the crypto and blockchain industry. 

The funding round noted participation from Coinbase Ventures, Arrington XRP Capital, OKEx, LD Capital, Krypital Group, MarketAcross, B21 Capital and other entities. Additionally, various senior executives and founders of Ethereum, Dfinity, Galaxy Digital, Hedera Hashgraph and Blockstream among others participated in this round. The commitment from all these entities confirms there is a need for sovereign decentralized finance on the Bitcoin network.

Moreover, Portal serves as a cross-chain DEX capable of bridging Bitcoin with other digital assets through atomic swap technology, which ensures users can trade from their wallets directly without relying on intermediaries or relinquishing control over their funds.

Michael Arrington, founder of Arrington XRP Capital, stated:

“Decentralized cross-chain bridging is one of the hardest problems in crypto right now, especially as multiple blockchains gain real traction. We’re excited to see Portal’s Bitcoin-native approach to multichain transfers go live and provide an alternative bridging mechanism to the growing number of active on-chain users.”

The features provided by Portal are vast and include peer-to-peer lending and borrowing, spot markets, as well as options. All market features operate on-chain in a P2P manner to offer a trustless environment. Thus, Bitcoin has a crucial role to play in the future of DeFi.

Bringing privacy to Bitcoin has been an ongoing challenge for developers. Portal has layer-two and layer-three technology — dubbed Fabric — to achieve that goal. Through censorship-free layers on top of the Bitcoin network, anyone can execute transactions privately and off-chain through “smart contracts.” That functionality expands to staking, liquidity, derivatives, issuing assets, peer-to-peer swaps and much more.

By leveraging Bitcoin’s native hash time-locked contracts, users can remain in control over their funds. If they provide liquidity for a trade, there is no counterparty risk or loss of funds to worry about. More importantly, Portal’s approach creates an incentive for everyone to intermediate transactions between peers.

Eric Martindale, CEO of Portal, added:

“We believe Bitcoin provides the much-needed financial infrastructure that the free, uncensorable internet-of-the-future will be built on, and although we are starting with a P2P exchange, our mission is to be the platform for decentralized, peer-to-peer human interactions, be it communications, financial transactions or social media.”

Portal will organize a public token sale on the Republic launchpad in October 2021. More information regarding this sale will be available through Portal’s official social media channels.

About Portal

Portal is DeFi built on Bitcoin, making DeFi unstoppable with anonymous, zero-knowledge swaps via the first true cross-chain DEX that’s genuinely trustless. It eliminates minting wrapped coins such as Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) and Wrapped Ethereum (wETH), or risky staking with intermediaries. With Portal, DeFi becomes a service that anyone can provide, maintaining anonymity within open, transparent markets with a security model as robust as Bitcoin mining.

The Fabric protocol is Portal’s layer-two and layer-three technology that enables building censorship-resistant communications, media and one-click cross-chain swaps all on Bitcoin.

For media inquiries, please contact: George Burke, george@getportal.co.