$28 million is raised by cryptocurrency principal trader Arbelos Markets, led by Dragonfly Capital.

The digital asset derivatives industry veterans Joshua Lim and Shiliang Tang formed Arbelos Markets, a major trading firm for cryptocurrencies, on Wednesday announced that they had secured $28 million in an investment round that was “significantly oversubscribed.”
Prominent cryptocurrency venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital oversaw the loan and seed equity funding for the project. Additional investors in the round included corporate partners FalconX, Circle Ventures, Paxos, P2 Ventures (formerly Polygon Ventures), Deribit, Chorus One, StarkWare, and Immutable; angel investors included Aevo, Cega, Talos, Amberdata, and Framework; and investment firms Room40 Ventures, Selini Capital, and Breed VC.
The investment was made as the digital asset market was still recovering from the 2022 crypto credit crisis, which brought down several businesses, including BlockFi, Celsius, and Three Arrows Capital. Simultaneously, as the asset class grows and moves past its retail-driven origins, more established and sophisticated participants are joining the market.
According to Joshua Lim in a recent interview, Arbelos, which was founded in the British Virgin Islands, seeks to close the vacuum created by the devastation by meeting the sophisticated investors’ needs for hedging and liquidity through cryptocurrency futures and options.
Prior to founding Arbelos in late 2023, Lim was head of derivatives at the now-defunct cryptocurrency lender Genesis, which also failed during the economic crisis, and Tang was chief investment officer at quantitative digital asset investing firm LedgerPrime.
According to Lim, one of the main causes of the cryptocurrency credit problem was a lack of transparency, with some companies providing financial records that were “outdated or manufactured,” concealing the real dangers from their borrowers.
The business hopes to address this issue by providing a “transparency engine” that enables clients to independently confirm Arbelos’ risk profile, balance sheet, and counterparty exposure in real time.
“Our key tenet [at Arbelos] was how we could prevent what happened in the last cycle,” Lim stated.
The company has become one of the biggest sources of options block liquidity, and in the first half of the year since its founding, its derivatives trading volume topped $25 billion in notional. It is active on both centralised and on-chain derivatives and options marketplaces.
Arbelos stated that it plans to grow its workforce, enter new markets, and provide more structured products using the money it acquired from investors.