With $200M Funding Commitment, Unizen Targets CeDeFi Ecosystem Expansion

Centralized decentralized finance, which represents a kind of middle-way towards crypto adoption, has gotten a big boost today with the news that Unizen has landed a $200 million "funding commitment" from the alternative investment firm Global Emerging Markets. 

Unizen is a leading powerhouse in the world of CeDeFi, which aims to bring the compliance of traditional finance to the flexibility provided by decentralized finance. The main goal of CeDeFi is to make the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain more accessible to big financial institutions that, until now, have been unable to engage with it due to their concerns over a lack of compliance. 

By bringing compliance to DeFi to meet the needs of retail and institutional investors, Unizen is effectively able to merge centralized exchanges such as Binance with their decentralized counterparts, like Uniswap. In this way, it can facilitate the fastest, most efficient and least expensive trade swaps across multiple CEX and DEX platforms, bringing greater value to its users. 

It's a compelling offering that has already gotten a lot of traction, with Unizen emerging as the poster child of the CeDeFi space. The Unizen platform offers a unique dynamic multi-asset staking capability that allows users to stake its native $ZCX token and provide liquidity, earning rewards paid out in other assets, such as ETH. 

While Unizen has already grown to encompass a thriving community, both the startup and GEM believe there's lots of room for further growth of its platform. 

The idea is to make the $200 million investment available in segments as a series of undisclosed milestones relating to performance have been met. In this way, Unizen said the funding will be optimized to the fullest, as it looks to improve its existing systems, enhance innovation, advertise its products, and accelerate the growth of its trade aggregation ecosystem. In addition, the funds will be used to expand Unizen's team as necessary to support its ongoing growth. 

Unizen will also tap the funding to support ZenX Labs, which is an incubator that was established to accelerate the growth of the most promising projects within Unizen's ecosystem. ZenX Labs identifies promising decentralized applications and provides them with funding and expertise to grow their adoption. 

Sean Noga, CEO of Unizen, said GEM will be a "potent and strategically aligned growth partner" in support of the rapid expansion of its platform, brand and community. 

GEM is a $3.4 billion alternative investment group with offices in New York, Paris and the Bahamas that has completed more than 530 investment acquisitions and transactions across 72 countries to date. One of its most recent investments saw it commit $400 million towards the growth of the Lithosphere blockchain developed by KaJ Labs.