Today, we are excited to share Violet’s new direction. We are building Mauve, the first compliant and registered* DEX, and in the process, further developing Violet to be the most flexible, comprehensive compliance infrastructure in DeFi and beyond. We are also taking this opportunity to announce an aggregate funding of $15M from a spectacular group of investors and operators.

DeFi is at a fork in the road: Either we continue building in an entirely open yet isolated ecosystem, or we begin bridging the gap between traditional finance through a willingness to engage with regulation and compliance. We believe the latter is essential for our industry to grow into a place where eventually, all of the world’s financial products and services are run on-chain. This world is compatible with what makes DeFi great – composability and its non-custodial nature.

Yet this world requires a new set of trust assumptions. For example, how can on-chain capital pools be trusted to exclude bad actors? Violet’s mission from inception has been to evolve trust. One of our earliest contributions to the industry was the Humanbound Token, pioneering compliance and robust sybil-resistance on-chain through human trust. We are now expanding on this early infrastructure to provide best-in-class, TradFi-level compliance guarantees directly on-chain, including KYC/B, global sanction list monitoring, geofencing, on-chain analytics, and multi-factor authentication to prove identity continuity.

It is the most comprehensive compliance stack in DeFi, and we are excited to announce Mauve – the first registered, compliant DEX – as the first product built on Violet. As a DEX, users benefit from the non-custodial architecture with immediate settlement and no intermediaries. Mauve provides TradFi-level compliance guarantees, enabling new actors to join the market and allowing Mauve to support a vastly expanded universe of assets. Eventually, Mauve will evolve into an on-chain backend for regulated financial services.

We envision Mauve becoming the seed within the compliant DeFi universe and will share a lot more information regarding its exact functionality and implementation details soon. In the meantime, we spoke to Fortune’s Jeff Roberts about where we are in our journey and what is ahead:

In addition, we are humbled and grateful to announce additional funding of $11.5M for an aggregate of $15M following our funding in early 2021, as we continue on our journey to help shape a more robust and sustainable DeFi ecosystem.

Thank you to Ethereal Ventures, FinTech Collective, and Balderton Capital for leading this new funding round, as well as Inflection, Coinbase Ventures, Brevan Howard, Compound, Lattice Capital, Goldentree Asset Management, and Wintermute for their participation.

We are equally excited about welcoming world-class founders and operators, including from OpenSea, Element Finance, Flashbots, Argent, Spruce, Ceramic, and Privy.

Special thanks to BlueYard Capital for their continued support.

*Mauve has submitted an application to register as a Virtual Asset Service Provider. The application is currently pending.