NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Slide, a startup enabling decentralized applications to serve an effortless experience for their users, has announced a $12.3M seed round co-led by Polychain Capital, a premier investor in cryptocurrency protocols and companies with the goal of accelerating the global adoption of crypto, and Framework Ventures, a venture capital firm known for its early entry into decentralized finance (DeFi) and blockchain gaming (GameFi). Other participants in the round include blue-chip VCs Coinbase Ventures, Outlander Ventures, and Circle Ventures. With this new funding, Slide will continue to invest in its team, proprietary infrastructure and distribution to dApps.
Slide enables dApps to effortlessly serve everyday users that lack crypto experience. Currently, dApps are forced to cater to more technical “crypto natives,” or spend months building infrastructure in-house to simplify blockchain experiences for everyday users. Slide provides dApps the ability to offer a seamless experience to their users – all in just a few lines of code.
“Web3 is radically limited by a poor user experience that only a tiny group of crypto-savvy users are willing to endure. If we actually want to onboard the next billion people into this industry, major changes have to be made,” said Teymour Farman-Farmaian, CEO and Co-Founder of Slide. “We believe Slide can bridge the gap between dApps and everyday users and make web3 as easy as web2.”
It is currently challenging to use dApps and interact with web3. Users must set up accounts with exchanges like Coinbase to buy crypto, then install and configure separate, non-custodial wallets to hold their funds. Even after funding their wallets, users are faced with using third party services to “bridge” crypto between blockchains (and must purchase additional blockchain-specific tokens each time) to use dApps – among many other pain points.
Slide streamlines this process, compressing hours into seconds. Users of Slide-equipped dApps will be able to instantly create wallets via email, purchase crypto and NFTs via card, and transact across chains without holding crypto for ‘gas fees’ (in less steps via batched transactions), and much more.
“This is a browser-level moment for web3,” said Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder of Polychain Capital. “Web3’s reach is limited by the complexities of blockchain technology, and Slide will for the first time enable users to access any dApp effortlessly – without knowledge of crypto or web3. Slide is revolutionizing web3 user experience and stands to bring the space to the masses.”
Slide was co-founded in early 2022 by Teymour Farman-Farmaian and Sam Hatem – both experienced in making web3 accessible – and will officially launch in the fall. Farman-Farmaian was formerly on the product team at Coinbase and generated tens of millions in annual revenue by enabling non-technical users to easily “stake” and earn yield on their crypto assets. Hatem previously served as a blockchain developer at Polymarket, where he built infrastructure to simplify blockchain user experience that handled more than nine figures of volume.
Slide’s team is composed of senior software engineers and builders from top tech companies including Coinbase, Stripe, Instagram, and Brave.
Individual investors in the round include Balaji Srinivasan, former Coinbase CTO; Ani Pai, Partner at Dragonfly Capital; Akash Garg, CTO of Moonpay; Raouf Ben Har, co-founder of Risk Harbor; Shayne Coplan, CEO of Polymarket; Justin Blau, CEO of Royal; and Qiao Wang and Imran Khan, co-founders of Alliance.
About Slide
Slide is bringing web3 to the masses by making dApps usable by anyone, no crypto knowledge necessary. Users of Slide-enabled dApps can purchase crypto and NFTs with card, custody and manage assets without dealing with extensions or private keys, seamlessly transact with any asset across any blockchain (with no blockchain-specific gas fees), and enjoy a web3 experience as simple as web2. To learn more, visit slide.so or our Twitter, @SlideWeb3
