On May 13, dTrade announced the closing of its seed funding round, which saw $6.4 million in investment from Three Arrows, DeFiance, Huobi and Polychain. 

DTrade aims to be the first derivatives exchange built on Polkadot. A press release shared with The Block said that it enables leveraged derivatives that settle on-chain. The goal is to remove custodial and counterparty risks from such trading.

DTrade co-founder Nikodem Grzesiak told The Block that many of the main contracts are going through audits ahead of a launch date in June. He said the second version of the perpetual swap exchange is now live on the Edgeware testnet, with a public testnet scheduled to go live in a few months.

The current team consists of 11 full-time employees. According to Grzesiak, dTrade’s native DET token will go live in June. He said that “55% of the tokens will be split between community treasury and liquidity mining incentives. The remaining 45% are for investors, team and advisors.”

Polychain led an earlier pre-seed funding round into DTrade that ended in March. It did not disclose the investment amount.

Polkadot-based DeFi projects have grown in stature in recent months, alongside rising buzz around the “multichain” alternative to Ethereum. Equilibrium, for example, saw a $2.5 million Series A at the beginning of April. 

DTrade will not be available in the U.S., whose regulators do not look kindly upon leveraged derivatives trading for retail investors.