Gelato raises $11M from heavyweight backers for Web 3.0 automation

Gelato aims to simply DeFi by automating smart contract operations and helping users rebalance their portfolios.

Smart contract automation network Gelato has become the latest to receive big backing from crypto venture capital giants.

Gelato has raised $11 million in a Series A funding round led by Dragonfly Capital and with participation from ParaFi Capital, Nascent, IDEO CoLab Ventures and Aave founder Stani Kulechov.

The funds were raised through a closed-door token sale and will go toward onboarding more blockchains to the network and increasing its staff from the current team of 15.

Gelato automates Ethereum smart contract operations by using what it calls “arbitrary logic” and bots. Its most prominent use case is addressing liquidity and volatility issues with cryptocurrency trading. The protocol can protect traders from severe losses by automatically rebalancing portfolios and executing trades on their behalf.

Third-party servers and systems are required to monitor smart contracts and conditions for their execution. Gelato does away with the intermediaries by using a decentralized network of bots to carry out these operations, simplifying decentralized finance (DeFi) for end-users.

Mika Honkasalo of ParaFi Capital explained that:

“Gelato expands the capabilities of smart contracts, which are by default inactive and only execute when a user triggers them.”

Gelato co-founder Hilmar Orth elaborated that Web 3.0 developers can now plug into an existing decentralized network instead of having to write custom bots run on centralized servers.

The Gelato Network currently supports smart contracts on Ethereum, Polygon and Fantom and will add additional support for Binance Smart Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism and Avalanche. Several projects are already using the system to automate contracts, including MakerDAO, Instadapp, B Protocol and QuickSwap.

Related: Gelato Network launches ‘G-UNI’ Uniswap v3 management token

In June, Gelato introduced an automated liquidity manager for Uniswap called G-UNI, which combined the capital efficiency of Uniswap v3 with the user experience of v2.

In August, Gelato integrated with DeFi aggregator Zerion to improve liquidity management for its users. This enabled Zerion’s 200,000 or so active monthly users to have their Uniswap v3 positions managed automatically.