While ZPX is targeting India and Singapore markets initially, it also intends to expand to the UAE, Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia over the next one year

ZPX team

ZPX, a startup that is building a decentralised cryptocurrency exchange in Singapore, today announced that it has secured US$ 1.3 million in seed funding from investors, including Singapore-based VC firm SeedPlus, and Silicon Valley-based Milliways Ventures.

Gokul Rajaram, Product Engineering Lead at Square; Freshdesk CEO Girish Mathrubootham; India Quotient‘s Founding Partner Anand Lunia; and Nithin Kamath of Indian financial services firm Zerodha, also co-invested in this round.

ZPX, which also has an office in Bangalore, will use the funds to build and launch new products and make key senior hires to the team. While the firm’s initial focus are India and Singapore markets, it also intends to expand to the UAE, Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia over the next 10-12 months.

Unlike centralised exchanges, decentralised exchanges aren’t coordinated by one entity. Instead, they run on a distributed ledger, like cryptocurrencies themselves do. This structure means that a decentralised exchange does not hold customers’ funds, positions, or information, and only serves as a matching and routing layer for trade orders.

“Centralised exchanges create a single point of failure and this is the reason why we hear about a number of hacks across global centralised crypto exchanges. While we understand the need for centralised exchanges, we believe a lot of the value in cryptos will be exchanged wallet to wallet over decentralised exchanges in the next two to three  years,” Aditya Mishra, Co-founder and COO of ZPX, told e27.

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ZPX’s decentralised crypto exchange, called ZenRelay, will also offer trustless non-custodial trading, improved transparency, and inter-exchange sharing of liquidity, claims Mishra.

The startup is also working on a number of token products, including 108 Token, an ERC20 token built on top of Ethereum, which it says will dynamically readjust every month to the top 15 crypto token assets based on their proprietary indexing methodology.

Michael Smith Jr, Partner at SeedPlus, said: “SeedPlus has a view that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are creating new opportunities for the financial markets in the form of investable instruments such as tokens. In addition, we believe that platforms for startups or established companies to launch tokens will be a critical part of the internet infrastructure as well as the exchanges to manage their liquidity. ZPX is at the forefront of this movement in Asia and we are excited to invest and help the team with their vision.”

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