Portal Gate, a privacy-centric DeFi infrastructure stack, has successfully closed a seed funding round, raising $1.1 million. The funding was led by Apollo Crypto and saw participation from UpsideDAO, Greythorn Asset Management, Comma3 Ventures, and other angel investors in the Web3 space.
Portal Gate, founded in 2022, aims to build compliant and private DeFi infrastructure to facilitate more efficient on-chain trading for institutions. The company’s first iteration is privacy pools that obfuscate links between wallets, and its core product will be a decentralized dark pool that enables users to transact on-chain with hidden prices and order sizes. Portal Gate is leveraging zero-knowledge-based compliance oracles to complete both off-chain and on-chain permissioning as Web3 moves towards a more regulated regime.
The funding will be used to scale the core team, launch privacy pools on the mainnet, and accelerate the development of the decentralized dark pool. The investors are bullish on the intersection of privacy and compliance in DeFi and believe that Portal Gate has identified specific pain points for institutional on-chain participants. They view a decentralized dark pool as a technically challenging but necessary piece of infrastructure.
According to Jemma Xu, a founding contributor, currently on-chain transactions are all in lit pools, making it difficult to trade on-chain with large orders as they are front-run by MEV bots, which leak alpha.
Portal Gate’s core contributors have been long-term builders and investors in digital assets since 2016-2017. The dark pool core developers have a proven track record, having founded one of the leading Web3 cross-chain protocols that secured over $1 billion in total value locked (TVL) without any security breaches.
Portal Gate plans to launch its privacy pool on the mainnet in Q3. Investors and interested parties can stay updated on the company’s progress through its Twitter, Medium, Discord, and Telegram channels.
Portal Gate’s successful funding round highlights the growing demand for privacy-centric DeFi infrastructure in the institutional space. The company’s focus on compliance and anonymity, along with its plans for a decentralized dark pool, positions it as a promising player in the evolving Web3 landscape.