Paradigm Backs ‘World’s Fastest’ Decentralized Exchange GTE With $15M Series A Investment

Paradigm, a major player in early-stage crypto investing, has led a $15 million Series A funding round for Global Token Exchange (GTE), a startup aiming to redefine decentralized trading. The company claims its platform matches the speed of top centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase—without compromising on decentralization.

GTE is built on MegaETH, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain, and uses a central limit order book (CLOB) system that mimics traditional financial markets. Unlike automated market makers (AMMs) such as Uniswap or PancakeSwap, GTE’s infrastructure is designed to process orders with price-time priority, more like the New York Stock Exchange than a typical DEX.

“We built a trading engine with the same latency as Binance or Coinbase, while keeping everything non-custodial and permissionless,” said co-founder Enzo Coglitore.

According to the team, this setup addresses two of crypto's biggest pain points: the trust demands of centralized platforms and the performance limitations of decentralized ones.

The platform’s design is aimed at retail traders seeking a seamless trading experience and at liquidity providers looking for fairer, more efficient price discovery mechanisms.

“We wanted to eliminate fragmented user behavior and high costs by building from the ground up,” Coglitore explained.

Paradigm sees promise in both the technology and the team behind GTE. “They have the right mix to go toe-to-toe with the biggest centralized and decentralized exchanges,” wrote partners Charlie Noyes and Caitlin Pintavorn in a statement.

The exchange’s testnet, launched earlier this year, attracted around 700,000 users—a promising indicator of market interest. GTE had already raised $10 million in prior rounds, including a $2.5 million community funding phase hosted on Echo.

Co-founder Matteo Lunghi emphasized that the goal is global accessibility:

“We want anyone to be able to trade anything, from anywhere, at any time.”