Latest news with #RockawayX
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Silhouette Raises $3 Million For First Shield Exchange On Hyperliquid
Zug, Switzerland, June 10th, 2025, Chainwire Silhouette is ushering in a DeFi Renaissance, supported by RockawayX, Hivemind Amber Group. NGC, No Limit Holding, and Protagonist. Silhouette, the shield exchange on Hyperliquid that protects personal trade information, is building a new arena of opportunities for DeFi traders, where sophisticated strategies remain protected without compromise, following its $3 million pre-seed fundraising round. The round was led by RockawayX and included Hivemind Amber Group. NGC, No Limit Holding, and Protagonist. As a shield exchange, Silhouette is addressing DeFi's privacy issue without undermining the core value of decentralisation. It creates a protected order flow in a transparent market, creating capital that can move freely and with confidence. Traders no longer have to worry about their strategies being exposed from the moment they post their intentions on-chain, risking front-running and MEV losses. 'We're in the middle of a DeFi Renaissance but the current DeFi set up is imperfect without privacy. While traders are able to execute incredible trades at speed these strategies are exposed from start to finish. Where privacy has been introduced, it's been over optimised at the expense of user experience. Silhouette is striking that balance and bringing in a new kind of exchange, a shield exchange, that brings the liquidity and decentralization of DEX's while shielding traders so they can grow and execute sophisticated strategies,'said Chandler De Kock, Co-Founder and CEO of Silhouette. Unlike previous privacy-focused platforms, Silhouette is bringing a new emphasis on liquidity and accessibility. Protection for traders is key. With shielded trades, users' strategies can last longer without giving up the overall permissionless and decentralised foundations of onchain markets. Silhouette is not running centralized servers to protect trades, rather the team is building with decentralized TEE host providers. Hyperliquid's ecosystem offers the perfect environment to introduce shielded trading. This active trading community will be able to use the liquidity they have onchain and see better, longer lasting results of their trading game plans. 'We're excited to back Silhouette as it aims to build the leading protected pool solution in crypto. We believe the timing is right—Silhouette won't have to build liquidity and network effects from scratch. Rather, it's launching in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, which is fast-becoming a dominant trading venue for spot and derivatives, and thus fertile ground for dark pool infrastructure, as users seek to protect highly profitable on-chain strategies. The founding team's deep relationships in that ecosystem give them a unique edge to execute fast,' said Samantha Bohbot, Partner & CGO. This first round of funding provides the runway to bring the minimal viable product (MVP) to life. The team has started building this MVP with a testing phase expected following its deployment. Contact
Arabian Business
25-04-2025
- Business
- Arabian Business
RockawayX launches UAE HQ, unveils Solana City to position Dubai as global blockchain hub
RockawayX, a global venture capital firm backing Web3 founders, announced the launch of its UAE headquarters. It also unveiled Solana City, a pioneering collaborative workspace and ecosystem designed to establish Dubai as the epicentre of global blockchain innovation. 'Moving the headquarters to the UAE was a strategic decision, given that the country has the highest crypto penetration rate in the world – 3 million crypto owners, accounting for 30 per cent of the population,' RockawayX said in a media release. Viktor Fischer, CEO of RockawayX, said Dubai is on track to overtake Europe and rival the United States as the next global blockchain hub. 'With forward-thinking regulation, infrastructure designed for speed and scale, and crypto adoption rates surpassing 30 per cent – the highest in the world – it offers exactly what the next decade of Web3 innovation needs,' said Fischer, a former McKinsey associate partner and alumnus of HEC Paris and INSEAD, who is steering RockawayX toward long-term expansion in the UAE. RockawayX expands to Dubai Solana City will launch in Q East, an iconic landmark in the shifting and technology-centric landscape of Dubai with state-of-the-art facilities built with technology at its core. 'Dubai has become a global hub for blockchain innovation. I'm excited to support RockawayX on Solana City — a bold initiative giving our ecosystem in the UAE the infrastructure it needs to scale, benefiting both Solana and the local economy,' said Alex Scott, Superteam Middle East. The announcement on new headquarters and Solana City follows a year of foundational work in the region, during which RockawayX relocated senior leadership and engineering talent from Europe, hired regional professionals, and deployed to date over $3 million in local investments. Dubai now serves as a permanent base for a 10-person team, positioning the firm at the heart of one of the world's fastest-growing crypto economies, the engineering-first blockchain investment firm managing over $2 billion in assets, said. Under Fischer's leadership, RockawayX is emerging as a regional counterpart to firms like Galaxy Digital, combining venture capital, infrastructure, and innovation — all anchored in deep technical expertise. A cornerstone of the firm's UAE vision is Solana City, a co-working and ecosystem-building initiative conceived by RockawayX. With 48 initial units and plans to scale tenfold, Solana City is designed as a dedicated hub for blockchain builders, funders, and founders. It represents the first physical blockchain city in Dubai, echoing the emirate's successful vertical clusters in media, healthcare, and fintech, and opens new partnership opportunities across sectors. RockawayX's local activity already includes major investments in Squads, a multi-signature wallet infrastructure platform built on Solana, and Exponent, a fast-scaling DeFi protocol. Globally, the firm operates dedicated bare-metal servers supporting 54 Proof-of-Stake blockchains and ranks as the top Ethereum validator on rated networks. It also runs specialised GPU servers for zero-knowledge proof generation and actively supports network reliability through snapshot infrastructure, ensuring validators can rejoin congested networks at speeds of up to 10GB per second. The firm's strategic alliances with hundreds of major players, including Binance, Bybit, A16z Crypto, Solana, and the Wormhole protocol – where RockawayX is one of only 19 global guardians – amplify its ability to scale ventures across liquidity, infrastructure, and distribution. artificial intelligence, and sustainability.
Forbes
24-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Solana's Early Backer, $2 Billion RockawayX, Launches New $125 Million Fund
Victor Fischer, founder and CEO of RockawayX RockawayX, the Prague-based crypto venture capital firm that backed Solana in 2018 when the blockchain was still a concept, has raised a fresh $125 million for its second early-stage fund despite a slowdown in crypto venture deal-making. The vehicle, closed in the first quarter and unveiled today, will pour most of its capital into Solana-focused startups. CEO Victor Fischer, a computer science engineer and former McKinsey consultant who bought his first bitcoin in 2015 because a coworking beneath his Prague flat accepted nothing else, began running Solana software from an apartment back when rivals insisted the blockchain needed plush data centers. That tinkering became RockawayX's calling card: the firm now oversees about $2 billion, operates its own data centers and employs 45 people, two-thirds of them engineers, across Prague, Dubai and London offices. 'Rather than investing in more L1s (core blockchains), we focused on building applications on Solana and being the first user for our founders—from providing liquidity to running solvers and operating hardware services,' says Fischer. That hands-on ethos worked. RockawayX's 2021 fund has more than doubled investors' money and is marked at over five times the invested capital, buoyed by early wagers on Solana (whose market cap has ballooned from $86 million in early 2021 to roughly $78 billion today), market maker Wintermute and lending platform Morpho Labs. That record convinced its investors to re-up just as U.S. crypto VC investment fell 22% in the first quarter, PitchBook data shows. Roughly two-thirds of the new fund will go to seed investments, the rest will sit in liquid, income-generating positions. Fischer's thesis is straightforward: as stablecoin adoption soars, users will hunt more opportunities to earn interest and the applications that supply them. 'We are positioning ourselves as the core investment firm experts in generating yield on chain,' he says. RockawayX already runs a $100 million on-chain credit pool that has been offering investors about 12% on an annualized basis. 'I think Solana has some work to do in terms of being accepted as a yield-generating platform versus a trading platform,' Fischer adds. The network creates new SOL tokens each year, about 4.6% more currently, to reward the people who help keep it running. Validators, who operate the network, share some of these rewards with users who stake, or lock up, their tokens with them. Because this built-in reward system already offers a yield of about 8%, around 65% of all SOL is simply staked. By comparison, only about 28% of ETH is staked on Ethereum. As a result, less SOL ends up in lending pools or other apps on Solana, explains Fischer. Still, Solana remains the firm's bull's-eye. RockawayX has backed more than 15 projects in the ecosystem and will open 'Solana City,' a Dubai accelerator hub, on May 1 with the Solana Foundation and Solana-focused developer firm Helius Labs.
