Paradigm invests $15 million in GTE, a startup billed as the ‘world’s fastest’ DEX

Early-stage crypto venture capitalism firm Paradigm said Monday that it exclusively led a $15 million Series A funding round in Global Token Exchange (GTE), a decentralized exchange startup confident that its trading capabilities can rival giant centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase.

GTE's founders call their startup "the world's fastest decentralized exchange."

"We've developed a central limit order book that updates at the exact same latency as Binance or Coinbase without sacrificing any of the properties of decentralization in terms of non-custodial, composable, permissionless, etc.," GTE co-founder Enzo Coglitore told The Block. 

The founders said GTE attempts to solve two major issues in crypto, the "blind trust" required to use centralized exchanges as well as the "high order latency [and] unfeasible transaction costs" commonly seen on DEXs, according to a statement.

"We saw generally that the current architecture of these like legacy blockchains required users to fragment their behavior across apps and venues," Coglitore said. "What we did is kind of like reinvent a lot of the stock from the ground up to create a really good and seamless trading experience."

GTE uses a so-called CLOB, or central order book, to match buy and sell orders based on price and time priority. The design is closer to traditional exchanges like the NYSE than blockchain-based automated market makers, which facilitate trading using liquidity pools, algorithms, and dynamic pricing.

Paradigm said that GTE has the "right mix of team and technology” to compete with centralized exchanges and AMMs like Uniswap and PancakeSwap, according to a statement from Charlie Noyes and Caitlin Pintavorn, both partners at the venture capital firm. The platform has been built exclusively on MegaETH, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain. 

Co-founder Matteo Lunghi said the company is mainly targeting retail traders that want to trade “anything from anywhere at any time” and liquidity providers that want to avoid being “picked off by toxic flow and actually enable price discovery to happen on the exchange.” The GTE testnet, launched earlier this year, reportedly attracted about 700,000 users. 

In January, GTE raised $10 million across three funding rounds. The $10 million included $1.5 million in a pre-seed round, about $7 million from a seed round funding, and another $2.5 million from a community-focused round on Echo.

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