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Web3 startup ZKX has raised $4.5 Mn in seed funding from StarkWare, Alameda Research, Amber Group, Huobi, Crypto.com and others. The Dubai-based startup plans to enter emerging markets, including India, with its decentralised exchange that is currently under development and expected to be launched in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Talking about its focus on India, ZKX founder Eduard Jubany said there is huge interest for cryptocurrency blockchain technologies in India, as well as across Asia. While India is a mobile-first country, most of the existing Web3 technologies are desktop oriented.

“So we needed to build and take the necessary steps to make sure that ZKX is able to service and provide opportunities to these mobile-first countries. And for that, we decided to build and use this new technology called ZK rollups which uses a new form of cryptography to provide higher scalability and lower fees,” Jubany told Inc42.

With its decentralised exchange, ZKX wants to build a platform which charges minimal transaction fees from users. In addition, it is trying to bring a user experience that will be more accessible through mobile. For example, ZKX is planning to allow logins on the exchange through Facebook or Gmail app as it wants to open up new ways to onboard users.

“So across the board, our idea here is how we can service the existent interest from this young crowd that wants to trade on cryptocurrencies, but we can do it in a way that is more effective with minimal fees, and without any central party,” Jubany stated.

ZKX was founded in 2021 by Eduard Jubany Tur, Naman Sehgal, and Vitaly Yakovlev. Prior to founding ZKX, Jubany and Sehgal held leadership positions at venture capital firm SOSV.

With the fresh capital, ZKX will focus on further development of its core offerings – the ZKX open-source protocol, DAO funding and growth of the ZKX ecosystem. With the ZKX protocol, the Dubai-based startup wants to create new frameworks to solve challenges in the decentralised finance (DeFi) market, including over-reliance on oracles, difficulty in bootstrapping liquidity for new derivatives, and centralised listing mechanisms.

For the use of the funds, ZKX wants to take a conservative stance, and will try to be more mindful about how it spends, Jubany said. It will also continue to focus on sustaining the team, hiring key essential roles, and building more awareness for the product. In addition, it will focus on security for exchange users and deployment of the protocol.

“India houses a massive pool of tech talent. Out of 20-30 Mn existing developers that exist in the world, only less than 0.1% are Web3 developers. There’s still a massive opportunity for us to onboard Web3 developers, and to bring in more talent into the space and start building technologies that cater to wider audiences,” Jubany said.

“Our initial strategy was to bring in these Web 2.0 talent from India, educate them into Web3 technologies, and onboard them into what basically is the cutting edge within Web3,” he added.

To scale its operation in India, ZKX plans to do more hackathons, workshops, and onboarding of developers in Bengaluru. It also plans to participate in conferences and hackathons throughout this year to provide more coverage on the new technologies. It wants to build more awareness within the tech community and eventually develop a technological hub, centred around Bengaluru, Jubany added.

While ZKX operates out of Europe and India remotely, it has 14 members in the Indian team right now.

When it comes to opportunities in the Indian market, Jubany claimed that there is no credible competitor in the derivatives space. There are a set of established exchanges like CoinDCX, Wazirx, CoinSwitch Kuber, but for derivatives there is no clear competitor yet, he added.

“We want to provide the flexibility for the community and the users to decide what they want to trade on the ZKX. They are going to have the ability to directly decide what assets go live on ZKX. That is a key difference compared to these other centralised exchanges,” he said.

However, the platform is initially launching with crypto assets. For the initial phase of its journey, it aims to have 1,00,00 Indian users. Over time, the startup plans to have 10 Mn users in India.