Australia’s Tracer DAO Raises A$6 Million To Build Derivatives Trading

Australian trading platform Tracer DAO has raised US$4.5 million (A$6m) in a strategic round backed by various crypto companies, including Melbourne-based crypto investment manager Apollo Capital.

Tracer is an Ethereum-based DeFi protocol that introduces a derivatives marketplace owned by a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) – a collective represented by written computer code or member votes through governance tokens.

Tracer is backed by Mycelium, a Brisbane-based group of developers who believe Australia has the potential to attract global blockchain investments . There are however uncertainties regarding the regulatory environment in the country, something many in the blockchain community have echoed in the past.

Mycelium Will Adapt to Regulatory Requirements in Due Course

Mycelium says it will work in a legal grey area, adapting to regulatory requirements once they become clear.

We are by no means anti-regulation and we believe consumers should have protections, but we are innovation maximalists looking to build on the cutting edge of technology with a global solution. We are still in the infancy of this structure coming to fruition.
We are in a discovery phase of this innovation. We need to have public policy conversations to make it safe for people to innovate in this space. We also need to discover how the law treats it; that is not an answered question yet.
Ash Morgan, Co-founder of Mycelium

Australia is an Attractive Target for Blockchain Investment

Australia is a potential market for DeFi and blockchain development, and Tracer is one of the latest protocols to join the various startups to have emerged recently. Speaking about the local regulatory laws and the potential use case for Australia, Mycelium co-founder Ash Morgan added:

[Australia] can definitely compete in this space and, with its global reputation for fintech, we can really lead on a thought basis up there with the US if we take a position early on. We expect Australia to pick up its act on growth around these products and we expect there to be rapid growth in employment in the coming few years. We want to be a part of that within Australia.

Tracer DAO will try to tackle the DeFi derivates space so everyone on the platform has access to new options. One option, Morgan says, is around water rights and energy as solar is more broadly implemented worldwide. This could be distributed by neobanks.

DeFi is expanding fast throughout Australia and soon, more investors may turn their gaze on the country, following the DeFi craze in Switzerland as Sygnum Bank is set to offer custody and trading of DeFi tokens.