Hybrid DEX/CEX exchange Cryptocurrencies.Ai raises $8 million, taps Binance liquidity

Alameda Research’s latest investment is aiming to build some tricky bridges between decentralized and centralized systems.

On Thursday, Cryptocurrencies.Ai (CCAI) announced a $8 million raise led by a host of major funds, including Alameda Research, DFG, Rarestone Capital and half a dozen others. The raise will be used to help bolster the exchange’s efforts to provide a bevy of user experience perks and features often lacking in decentralized exchanges.

Among the features touted are built-in tools for automated trading and bots, as well as notes, calendars and performance tracking — all of which are hypothetically available to users of exchanges like Uniswap, but only through third-party add-ons rather than being natively built into the interface.

In a press release on Thursday, CCAI founder Hisham Khan said that bringing these tools and the exchange under the same umbrella will enable traders of all stripes to access additional utility and efficiency.

“From traditional financial institutions to the retail traders of Gen Z, digital assets and Bitcoin are already creating substantial changes in the lives of people from a range of demographics. But the industry all too often accepts frustratingly poor user experience and fragmentation as both crypto natives and newcomers are forced to use a variety of different tools to optimize their trading strategies. We’re changing that by bringing everything into one place.”

Additionally, the exchange features a hybrid centralized/decentralized model that leverages an integration with Binance to offer traders additional liquidity and user experience options.

“The Binance integration helps with the liquidity, then we provide our own innovative features on top of it through the exchange,” said Khan in an interview with Cointelegraph. “It’s the only one in the industry that offers such innovative tools for automation, enabling traders to get access to these risk management settings.”

The hybrid model does come with trade-offs, however. Much like the somewhat maligned and recently announced Aave institutional lending pool, users will have to submit to Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering requirements — a long-awaited “CeDeFi” (centralized decentralized finance) development that some observers warn could “kill” the theoretically permissionless DeFi movement.

Khan noted that while users will need to undergo KYC verification to access the liquidity benefits of the platform, “The DEX is not currently going to have KYC/AML” and “It’s fully decentralized.”