The company, founded in 2020, announced today that it raised a $4.3 million seed round led by Dragonfly Capital Partners with participation from Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Solana Ventures and others. The company ended up taking in more capital than it had first expected and plans to use it to scale quickly this year, particularly by hiring engineers familiar with the Rust programming language used by Solana — a relatively small talent pool today, she added. Toyosaki, who also headed up marketing at Bitcoin.com, told TechCrunch in an interview that many of the strategies available to crypto derivatives traders today are fairly risky, a motivating factor behind why she founded Cega, which she says is the first-ever DeFi exotic derivatives protocol. Its first product is a fixed-coupon note, which Cega says offers investors superior yield, downside protection, and compounded returns. The round values Cega at $60 million, Toyosaki told TechCrunch.