DeFi for the Small Guy: Algorand-Based Tinyman Raises $2.5M Ahead of DEX Launch

Tinyman, an automated market maker (AMM) on the Algorand blockchain, recently raised $2.5 million and is expected to launch in full on Thursday.

It joins a crop of projects seeking to attract decentralized finance (DeFi) users to new chains. Be it Trader Joe on Avalanche or Fantom quickly surpassing $5 billion in locked value, traders are increasingly finding alternatives to the high fees associated with Ethereum-based DeFi.

Tinyman raised its $2.5 million from 20 investors, including Borderless Capital, Arrington Capital and The LAO. Genesis Capital, Digital Currency Group (the parent company of CoinDesk), BlockTower Capital and GoldenTree Asset Management are also investing. The exchange has been operating in testnet, a blockchain used for testing purposes, since August.

The Tinyman investment comes after the Algorand Foundation last month announced it had launched a 150 million ALGO ($300 million) fund to support DeFi projects on the Algorand network.

”For any of these blockchains ecosystems to exist, there needs to be these core projects that act as a gateway between money and investors,” Tinyman founder Kaan Eryilmaz said in an interview with CoinDesk. “It makes sense to build an AMM for Algorand because there wasn’t one and it desperately needed one.”

Eryilmaz sees governance, smart contract updates, accessibility and an easier interface as the next steps for the Tinyman platform.

“We are a good example of things that can be built on Algorand,” Eryilmaz said. “Tinyman shows that Algorand is growing.”

Operating an AMM on Algorand has clear advantages, according to Ninos Mansor, a partner at Arrington Capital.

“The market can now have ‘fast DeFi’ without caving to centralized blockchains,” Mansor said via Telegram. “Over time, as Algorand captures an institutional capital base, these advantages will enable more sophisticated AMM primitives like novel invariant design.”

Arrington Capital launched a $100 million fund for Algorand-based investments in June.

“We see Tinyman as one of the catalysts for the Alrogrand system to kick off and we see a lot of hype on the VC side,” Eryilmaz said. “There’s a lot of potential for Algorand to grow.”