Ox Labs’ Bandeali Says ‘Everything of Value Will be Tokenized’

Ox Labs, the maker of Matcha, the popular DEX aggregator, and a key partner for Coinbase on its fledgling NFT offering, has a mountain of fresh capital to work with. On April 26, 0x Labs raised $70M in a round led by Greylock Partners.

“When we were starting 0x almost six years ago, we had this thesis that everything of value would eventually be tokenized,” Amir Bandeali, co-founder and co-CEO of 0x Labs, told The Defiant. With this thesis in mind, they named their company after the hexadecimal address 0x at the beginning of every token.

0x Labs offers Matcha, the search engine for tokens; 0x API, which supplies multi-chain aggregated liquidity as a service; and 0x Protocol, the “backbone for decentralized exchanges.” 0x has enabled over $157B in tokenized value to flow across 43M+ trades.

Their infrastructure also powers Coinbase’s new NFT platform. Harkening back to their original thesis, 0x Labs rolled out a set of NFT swapping features earlier this year that enable users to exchange tokens on multiple blockchains such as Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche.

Bandeali believes that over time, there will be a “variety of different marketplaces that pop up that tap into different verticals” like NFT projects launching their own marketplaces or current marketplaces tapping into verticals like gaming. Although Bandeali admits that “all the big NFT booms have been impossible to predict,” their thesis of tokenized value remains their focus.

Tech Stack

With the recent influx of capital, Bandeali told The Defiant that 0x Labs is working on growing their team and the varied parts of their tech stack: they plan to integrate new chains like Solana, invest in cross-chain functionality, and expand NFT swapping functionality.

Other investors joining the Series B round include Pantera, Sound Ventures, OpenSea, Coinbase, the hedge fund Brevan Howard, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Jared Leto, the Academy Award-winning actor, also invested in Ox Labs.