Violet, the world’s leading provider of privacy-protective compliance and identity infrastructure for Decentralised Finance (DeFi), announced the launch of Mauve, the world’s first compliant Decentralised Exchange (DEX) purpose-built to offer the best of both DeFi and Traditional Finance (TradFi) to the crypto markets.
Backed by $15 million in funding from a series of prominent global investors – including BlueYard Capital, Balderton, Ethereal Ventures, FinTech Collective, Brevan Howard and Coinbase Ventures, among others – Violet plans to use the capital raised to accelerate the global adoption of Mauve.
Co-Founder of Violet, Markus Maier, explains, “Mauve is a direct response to the FTX fallout, which has significantly eroded trust in crypto globally by misappropriating funds. The future is dependent on the continued adoption of non-custodial crypto exchanges. Mauve empowers its users to trade without surrendering custody of their assets. This means no one can access, much less steal, any retail or institutional investor’s funds, helping to restore confidence among market participants.”
Existing DEX platforms on aggregate, still lag custodial exchanges in trading volume because they are entirely open. This means they can’t meet traditional finance compliance requirements such as anti-money laundering rules and sanctions laws, hindering institutional adoption.
Mauve requires its users to undergo rigorous compliance checks. These checks ensure compliance-conscious users, who are currently restricted to centralised and custodial exchanges, feel confident migrating to DeFi. Fully transparent and governed by audited smart contracts, users can trade with instant settlement without relying on intermediaries.
“The timing of the release of Mauve is critical given that crypto finds itself once again in the crosshairs of global regulators,” said Sean Lippel, General Partner at FinTech Collective. “Our thesis has always been that in order to make DeFi sustainable in the long term, it will need real-world use cases and connectivity that can only be accomplished with a robust identity and compliance layer. We think Mauve is the beginning of a new wave of institutional-ready protocols that still have all the benefits of decentralisation, composability, and transparency.”
Mauve brings benefits of DeFi and TradFi together to empower crypto investors globally. From a DeFi standpoint, the solution utilises DeFi architecture to enable self-custody that ensures funds remain the property of their true owner, not a separate custodian. From a TradFi standpoint, the platform offers its users TradFi-level compliance guarantees to reduce counterparty risk drastically.
“We envision a future without intermediaries where all financial products and services run on decentralised crypto rails,” said Violet Co-Founder Philipp Banhardt. “This vision requires deep integration between TradFi and DeFi, and is the reason why we started Violet and now Mauve. We are excited to partner with other builders as we advance on our mission to evolve trust in DeFi, towards more robust and sustainable growth going forward.”
“Mauve ushers in a new paradigm of compliant DeFi protocols, bridging the gap between on-chain continuous trading, transparency and compliance,” said Min Teo, Managing Partner, Ethereal Ventures.
Mauve relies on Violet’s on-chain compliance infrastructure, which issues privacy-preserving compliance credentials, in addition to leveraging multi-factor authentication for security and identity continuity. The credentials are composable across other applications and will ultimately position Mauve to be the cornerstone of a far-reaching compliant DeFi ecosystem that leverages Violet’s credentials.
Founded in early 2021 by Markus Maier and Philipp Banhardt in Berlin, Violet is focused on helping DeFi fulfil its potential to become the default financial system of the 21st century. To facilitate this transition, the Violet team has designed and built privacy-protective compliance infrastructure that is directly embedded in the blockchain.
