Investors in the round included Keyrock, Re7 Capital, Daedalus Collective, and Dmitry Tokarev, CEO of Copper.co, among others.

The venue, custom-built for rates derivatives, seeks to combine transparency and efficiency of zero-counterparty risk on-chain trading, where collateral and risk are managed entirely on the blockchain, with the familiar experience and accessibility of centralized exchanges.

Traditional rate markets enable institutional-grade risk management for derivative traders and form the foundation for fixed-income and other investment products. Rho aims to create a highly capital-efficient market for crypto-specific rates, such as staking, digital asset lending, and funding rates, to enable the same advantages for institutional crypto traders. A private beta of Rho’s market on Arbitrum will be launched with a select set of global trading partners later this year.

Rho Labs was founded in late 2022 by Alex Ryvkin, formerly the Chief Product Officer of Copper.co, a leading provider of institutional crypto trading infrastructure. Alex spent over a decade in capital markets and FinTech as a sales trader, derivatives structurer, and startup

CEO.

Alex Ryvkin, Founder and CEO of Rho Labs, commented:

“Interest Rate Derivatives represent the largest asset class in traditional finance with over $500T in outstanding interest. Our ultimate goal is to introduce this market to the advantages of

on-chain trading while offering crypto traders the opportunity to trade the most prominent rates in the ecosystem, as enjoyed by participants of TradFi markets.”

Olga Shikhantsova, Partner at Speedinvest, said:

“Market participants across the world widely use IRDs to efficiently hedge against or to capitalize on future rate changes. Given the apparent importance of rates to the global macro environment, we are very happy to support this project, which seeks to use technology to make

rates markets more robust and secure. We are excited to see what blockchain’s role will be in the future of capital markets, and we continue supporting the projects developing this thesis.”