Umee, a startup that develops decentralized finance tools that provide liquidity across blockchains, today announced that it has raised $32 million in additional funds during a token sale in preparation for its mainnet launch coming in February 2022.

The token sale set a record for CoinList, a platform that does sales of tokens before they appear on exchanges, with more than 922,000 registrants and 64,000 new token holders added to the Umee blockchain.

This funding round follows a $6.3 million seed round from Polychain and Coinbase in June.

Once the protocol’s mainnet is launched it will provide a base layer for what it calls “money lego primitive” applications to be built on top of it to allow for liquidity between different blockchain networks. The initial objective of the tools will be to permit developers to provide services in three areas: establishing cross-chain interest rates, interchain leverage and multichain staking.

Currently, separate blockchain networks create fragmentation between different DeFi applications built into them. This means that a DeFi app built on the Ethereum blockchain can’t exchange value with the Binance Chain blockchain, and vice versa. Umee’s protocol and tools will help remove this barrier for developers.

According to a report from DeFi Pulse cited by Bloomberg, the DeFi market exceeded $100 billion in October. This value was reported by adding together cryptocurrency assets across platforms providing services such as lending, exchanges, derivatives and assets. That compares with a DeFi market size of $30 billion in January.

The new funding will go toward expanding the core team, the company said, including hiring developers and engineers. The funds will also be used to expand legal compliance resources, add underlying infrastructure and add more to its global community through marketing.

Umee will be releasing a beta web app in the next few days so that its broader community can interact with its applications to get a “feel for how Umee will work” before the slated mid-February 2022 ship date of the mainnet.

Image: geralt/Pixabay