Paradigm Labs
Basic
- Shut down (11-3-2020).
"But in a blog post Tuesday, founder and CEO Liam Kovatch said: "Our team has come to the decision that without significant product market fit and limited resources to pursue emergent opportunities, the kind of success we envisioned for Paradigm Labs is unlikely."
Paradigm's failure to "carve a viable niche in the DEX marketplace" came as a result of a fast-evolving and fluid DeFi space that was difficult for the company to navigate, according to the post.
Its initial project, an order book that could be shared between different trading platforms, quickly became "obsolete" as Uniswap and P2P market infrastructure 0x Mesh grew in popularity, Kovatch said."
Zaidan
"Zaidan is a non-custodial trading solution developed by Paradigm Labs that provides an extremely price-competitive alternative to existing DEX and relayer models. Zaidan is ultimately designed as an API-based liquidity solution intended to provide public, high quality trading infrastructure to a variety of projects. The current iteration of Zaidan follows a conventional client-server architecture. The client is open-source and can be found on the Paradigm Labs GitHub."
War Chest
"Zaidan’s War Chest is a ZRX staking pool that allows Paradigm Labs to recoup protocol fees we pay to the 0x system during normal operation of the Zaidan trading system. We became the first mainnet staking pool to be included in the public registry, and enjoyed seeing the pool perform among the top three pools (by ZRX staked and fees collected) for almost every one of the last 11 staking epochs. At its peak, Zaidan’s War Chest had almost $1M worth of ZRX staked."
Shut Down
"Although Paradigm had begun to make headway with a 0x-based non-custodial request-for-quotation system known as Zaidan, the company was "constrained by the high-capital requirements," meaning it couldn't service trades or "secure the necessary funding" to keep it running.
"The idea for Zaidan ... came to us late in the company’s life cycle at which point we were [too] under resourced to fully develop Zaidan. In general, we believe we were a bit too early," Kovatch said. At the time of the seed round, Kovatch told CoinDesk the company had decided to cap investment at $1 million so the firm could remain "capital efficient and lean."
With Zaidan already shut down, Kovatch said Paradigm's 0x staking activities – known as Zaidan's War Chest – would be gradually wound up, along with the company, over the next month."
Team, investors, partners
"It had a promising start in 2018 when it raised $1 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by Polychain Capital, with additional placements from Dragonfly Capital and Chapter One."
