KR1 PLC tops up in holding in Vega Protocol

() said Vega Protocol (VEGA), a portfolio company, has completed a US$5mln funding round led by Arrington Capital and Cumberland DRW.

The funding round included participation from previous backers as well as new groups including Coinbase Ventures and ParaFi Capital.

KR1 also invested a further US$150,000 in exchange for 194,999.17 VEGA tokens at a price of US$0.77 per token.

This investment is in addition to KR1’s seed round participation, announced in October 2019. Across both funding rounds, the company now holds a total of 842,493.91 VEGA tokens.

Vega is a decentralised derivatives protocol that allows anyone to launch markets and eliminates centralised gatekeepers to provide high throughput, low-fee trading in a capital-efficient way.

In doing so, the protocol bridges the immense industry of derivatives in traditional finance with the still nascent and rapidly evolving world of decentralised finance.

Vega is currently advancing towards its mainnet release, said KR1, with future plans including self-custodied cross-chain collateral, a trustless bridge into the Ethereum ecosystem, as well as bridges into other major blockchains such as Bitcoin, Polkadot and Cosmos.

George McDonaugh, KR1’s co-founder and managing director, added: “Vega is one of the most anticipated projects in our portfolio and we are very happy to be able to support the team again in this latest round, especially considering the incredible progress they have made.

To open up financial infrastructure for everyone in a fair way is one of the goals of the blockchain landscape and Vega will prove to be a major step change towards this becoming a mainstream reality, he said.