Key Highlights
- DWF Labs launches a $75M DeFi fund, offering capital, liquidity, and hands-on support to help early-stage projects scale and grow.
- The fund targets teams solving real DeFi challenges in trading, lending, and yield, focusing on projects with working products and clear growth potential.
- Despite past hacks, DWF continues bold investments, including $25M in WLFI, showing confidence in early-stage, high-potential DeFi ventures.
DWF Labs, a prominent market maker in the crypto industry, has launched a $75 million fund to support the next stage of growth in decentralized finance (DeFi). The fund will focus on projects creating decentralized perpetual (perp) trading platforms, money markets, and yield-generating products across Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, and Base.
According to the company’s announcement, it will provide funding, liquidity, and practical support to help teams grow and scale their projects. The post added that the initiative offers “capital + liquidity + ecosystem support for teams ready to scale,” signaling a push to back early-stage DeFi projects with both funding and operational resources.
The move signals a shift in crypto markets, where institutional demand for robust DeFi infrastructure is increasing. DWF Labs’ Managing Partner, Andrei Grachev, explained, “DeFi is entering its institutional phase. We’re seeing real demand for infrastructure that can handle size, protect order flow, and generate sustainable yield.”
Strategic focus on real utility
The fund focuses on teams that already have a working product, a clear and unique idea, and the ability to grow it successfully. DWF Labs wants projects that tackle big, core problems instead of just making small tweaks to existing tools. In this way, the firm hopes to support projects that could shape the future of decentralized finance over the next decade.
Moreover, DWF Labs will extend more than just financial support. Portfolio teams gain access to active TVL and liquidity provisioning, go-to-market execution help, and DWF’s extensive network of exchanges, market makers, and institutional partners.
“This multi-layer support gives founders an unfair advantage in a market where distribution and liquidity matter as much as product,” Grachev noted.
DeFi market growth and context
Meanwhile, the DeFi sector remains resilient despite market fluctuations. Total value locked across the DeFi sector currently stands at $121.145 billion, as per DefiLlama. This would translate to a 2.63% increase in 24 hours. Stablecoins have kept their market capitalization above $305 billion, while 24-hour DEX and perpetual contract volumes reached $10.739 billion and $41.394 billion, respectively.
The growth trajectory of DeFi, which peaked at nearly 180 billion dollars in TVL in 2021, contracted sharply in 2022. Since mid-2023, activity has recovered gradually. Thus, the ecosystem shows renewed investor interest in lending, trading, and yield-generating protocols.
Past challenges and strategic moves
DWF Labs has faced stiff challenges in the past few years. In 2022, hackers linked to North Korea’s AppleJeus group stole over $44 million in USDC and USDT stablecoins. Analysts say the attackers emptied a compromised wallet over several hours, converting the funds to Bitcoin and moving them through mixers.
In April 2025, DWF made a big move by investing almost $25 million in World Liberty Fi (WLFI), a DeFi project supported by the Trump family. With this money, DWF bought around 250 million WLFI tokens at $0.10 each—about 6.7 times more than the price during the project’s first funding round. This shows that DWF likes to back early-stage projects they really believe in, especially ones with strong growth potential.
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