A New Crypto Exchange Blends the Best of DeFi and CeFi

London, April 30th – X10, a hybrid crypto exchange providing the centralized exchange experience DeFi lacks, launches out-of-stealth today with $6.5M in funding. The company’s investors include Tioga Capital, Semantic Ventures, Cherry Ventures, Starkware, and Cyber fund — along with notable angels such as executives from Revolut and the founder of Lido, Konstantin Lomashuk.

X10 provides users with the execution speed and features of a centralized exchange, but with full self-custody and settlement of trades on-chain. With its Optimized Hybrid Model and Enhanced Settlement Architecture, X10 will enable users to perform perpetuals trading in DeFi with superlative latency and throughput, which will improve liquidity and UX. At the same time, X10 inherits ideas of on-chain trade settlement, validation, and self-custody from DeFi exchanges, which guarantee both the safety of customer funds and transparency.

The advantages of centralized exchanges are evident: they offer an extensive portfolio and great latency and throughput, catering to the needs of the vast majority of users. Notably, most of the trading volume of perpetuals, the most popular trading product in crypto, is handled by CeFi platforms. However, CeFi has a massive flaw: security and transparency. As was the case with FTX and many other popular centralized exchanges, CeFi carries the risk of fund loss if bad actors control the exchange. In contrast, the design of X10, which provides self-custody and on-chain trade settlement, avoids this issue. X10 aims to complement DeFi-native trust with a comprehensive product portfolio and enhanced speed, offering traders a complete and efficient solution.

X10 was founded by Revolut alumni with experience in designing and developing high-quality financial products for millions of users. The company is led by Ruslan Fakhrutdinov, former Head of Crypto Ops at Revolut.

Ruslan Fakhrutdinov, CEO and Founder of X10, said, “With X10, we want to give our users and traders the best of both worlds. Imagine the features and the speed of Coinbase or Binance but with full self-custody. The FTX situation, where users only got back a third of their funds, serves as a wake-up call for the industry. It urges us to reinforce trust and efficiency in crypto trading through on-chain trade settlement, validation, and self-custody”.

Performance

X10 operates as a hybrid Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) exchange. Order processing, matching, position risk assessment, and transaction sequencing are handled off-chain, which ensures great performance. Stellar latency and throughput work to benefit market makers by allowing them to update the order book faster. This leads to up-to-date prices, narrower spreads, deeper liquidity, as well as significantly enhancing UX.

Trade settlement occurs on-chain through the StarkEx Layer 2 engine, guaranteeing self-custody and transparency, which are also ensured through On-Chain Settlement and Validations, as well as Independent Oracle Price Providers. The former safeguards against fraudulent or incorrect transactions that contradict the on-chain trading logic; this is because X10 settles each trade on the blockchain, utilizing on-chain validations embedded in smart contracts. The latter, by sourcing market prices from independent oracle providers, protects against potential price manipulation, ensuring an equitable and accurate reflection of asset values within our ecosystem.

User experience

In addition to safety and superior performance, X10 is designed to offer a user experience within the realm of DeFi that mirrors that of CeFi exchanges and traditional web platforms:

Enhanced trading experience: X10 offers multiple trading sub-accounts, a wide range of advanced order types, partial liquidation logic, an advanced API, and a professional-grade SDK.
Premier UX: X10 provides a customizable web interface and advanced market and portfolio analytics among other features — which include order book depth charts, funding rate and open interest histories.
Seamless onboarding for retail users: streamlined and secure wallet creation with social accounts, premier on- and off-ramping options provided through trusted global partners, and trading convenience on the go with our upcoming mobile app and Telegram bot.

About

X10 is building a fully-fledged self-custody exchange that provides the experience of a centralized exchange in DeFi. X10 was created by Revolut’s former Head of Crypto Operations, along with others formerly working for Revolut who have expertise in designing and developing high-quality financial products for millions of users. X10 aims to bring efficient and profitable trading practices into the transparent web3 space.

For more information, please visit https://x10.exchange/