Exclusive: True Markets raises $11 million and launches a new Solana-focused Crypto Trading app

Co-founders Vishal Gupta and Patrick McCreary are veterans of Goldman Sachs and Coinbase, helping to launch global trading products. Now, the crypto exchange landscape is getting more and more crowded, Gupta said luck Its true market is poised to capture the flood of new blockchain users through a combination of platform speed, cost and design.

“What we’re looking at here is that US retail crypto users are barely receiving services,” Gupta said. “The reality is that our team has been building the basics with Crypto for a long time.”

The evolution of cryptography

After a career in traditional finance, Gupta played a leadership role in pioneering crypto exchanges before departing himself in a true market. Release Last fall, seeded funds from stealth to crypto-centric investors, including reverse ventures, were $9 million.

Learning from lessons from past failures like FTX, a grand way of collapse in late 2022, run by Sam Bankman-Fried, Crypto Exchange designed TrueX, the underlying exchange of true markets, to separate core trading capabilities. This includes relying on blockchain infrastructure company Paxos to act as a custodian, rather than holding the user’s assets themselves.

TrueX, which acts as a centralized matching engine, primarily for institutional users, recently launched live trading for clients, focusing on spot trading for what Gupta called “Head and Torso” assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana. The True Markets app, which launches this week, reflects the next major steps on the platform.

Like TrueX, the True Markets app is non-integrated, meaning it does not hold crypto assets on behalf of the user. Instead, it relies on infrastructure provider turnkey to support hosted wallets. However, unlike TrueX, the app focuses on retail customers. It is built on the Solana blockchain and supports Solana-based tokens. Memecoin Boom. Gupta says the true market whitelists new tokens available for trading weekly, including warnings about potential risks such as ownership concentration. “This really feels like the exchange should be more like a gateway, not a gatekeeper,” Gupta said. luck.

The True Markets app will first be built around Solana, but Gupta said it plans to launch more cryptocurrencies over the summer, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, before expanding to other forms of tokenized assets.

The crowded market

While the new Crypto Exchange appears to be entering the US market every day, Gupta claimed that US use is still limited by a few options and Coinbase is still a runaway favorite. However, for users, lack of true competition means high fees and slow processing times.

Gupta said the true market goal is to target both crypto veterans and users entering the space for the first time. Despite many options, Gupta said that his and McClairy’s deep background in both traditional finance and crypto trading meant that they could reconstruct the exchange experience from scratch, including providing non-custodial solutions. “The reality is that 15 people probably can do the crypto exchange very well,” he said. luck. “They are all billionaires or prisons. The other two are me and my co-founders.”

Top investors purchased Gupta’s vision. The company’s new Series A round is supported by existing investors such as PayPal ventures, variants, and RRE ventures and mutual ventures. The company currently has 10 full-time employees.

Gupta admitted that he cannot compete in marketing with other crypto exchanges that often shell out the luxury sponsorships of sports teams and arenas, but he said the true market goal is to be the best option for users by the end of summer, in terms of price, speed and experience levels. This includes better displays and data, such as the so-called “sparklines,” visualization of market momentum and price action.

“There’s room for competition,” Gupta said. “Our goal is not necessarily to be the biggest exchange, but to be the best infrastructure, the best team and the best platform.”