WOO

WOO is an AI-powered trading and liquidity infrastructure platform that spans centralized and decentralized finance, delivering institutional-grade execution to retail traders, DeFi users, and market professionals. Co-founded in 2019 by Jack Tan and Mark Pimentel — the pair who also established quantitative trading firm Kronos Research — WOO was designed to close the gap between institutional market-making capabilities and the accessibility of open on-chain markets.

Core Mechanism

WOO's foundational technology is the Synthetic Proactive Market Making algorithm (sPMM), a pricing model that simulates the depth, spread, and competitive pricing of a centralized order book within a decentralized smart contract environment. Rather than relying on passive automated market making, sPMM draws on real-time centralized market-making signals — sourced from Kronos Research's trading infrastructure — to offer tighter spreads and deeper liquidity than conventional AMMs. This allows WOOFi to match or beat CEX pricing for common token pairs while preserving the self-custody model of DeFi.

The platform aggregates liquidity from leading exchanges and routes it through its GUI products and API infrastructure, making the same deep pools accessible to retail DeFi users, DEX aggregators including 1inch and Paraswap, and institutional counterparties through a private dark pool called Wootrade.

Product Suite

WOOFi is the flagship decentralized exchange. It enables token swaps, cross-chain swaps, earn vaults, and — through WOOFi Pro — gasless orderbook perpetual futures trading at up to 100x leverage with any-chain deposits. WOOFi has accumulated over $42 billion in cumulative trading volume and serves more than 250,000 monthly active users across its supported networks.

WOO X is the centralized trading platform built around a Payment for Order Flow model, enabling near-zero fee trading for users who hold and stake WOO. In September 2025, Web3 private equity firm FusionX Digital took over operations of WOO X, allowing the core WOO team to redirect focus toward WOOFi's DeFi expansion and the project's growing AI initiatives.

Starchild is WOO's AI agent platform, launched as part of the protocol's strategic pivot toward intelligent automation. It combines language models, on-chain data, and over 500 application connectors to surface trading signals, curate DeFi strategies, and execute actions across the ecosystem. Starchild positions WOO as infrastructure for agent-compatible finance rather than a single-product exchange.

WOO Stake is the on-chain staking hub for WOO token holders, providing governance participation, fee revenue sharing, and protocol incentives.

WOO Token

The WOO token launched on October 30, 2020 with a fixed maximum supply of 3 billion tokens. The protocol runs a deflationary model in which 50% of monthly revenue is used to buy back WOO on the open market, with tokens subsequently burned on the 10th of each month. There is no ongoing inflation schedule and no future token dilution built into the design.

Token holders benefit from reduced trading fees on WOO X (up to a 0.05% taker fee reduction), eligibility for yield farming across DeFi integrations, and governance participation — with a minimum of 1,800 WOO required to vote on protocol direction, capital allocation, and ecosystem priorities. WOO token is available across multiple blockchains through cross-chain bridges, including on Solana.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

In October 2024, WOO brought its sPMM technology to Solana with the launch of WOOFi Swap on the network, initially supporting SOL and USDC trading pairs. The deployment was described as a phased rollout designed to validate liquidity provision strategies before scaling. WOO VP Ben Yorke stated that once the initial phase was confirmed, WOOFi would expand to support more Solana-native assets, including staked SOL derivatives and other major tokens.

The Solana roadmap also includes WOOFi Pro — the perpetuals DEX — bringing gasless orderbook-style perp trading with deep institutional liquidity to Solana DeFi users. Prior to Solana, WOOFi had deployed across 11 EVM-compatible networks, and the Solana integration represented its first non-EVM chain deployment. The protocol's sPMM model is particularly suited to Solana given the chain's high throughput and low fees, which support the frequent price updates the algorithm requires.

Cross-chain functionality means Solana users can also access WOOFi earn vaults and perpetuals using deposits bridged from other networks.

Team and Backing

WOO was incubated by Kronos Research, a quantitative trading firm founded by Jack Tan and Mark Pimentel that handles significant daily trading volume across crypto markets. Kronos Research continues to serve as WOO's primary liquidity partner, giving the protocol a direct pipeline to professional market-making infrastructure.

WOO has raised over $52 million across multiple funding rounds: a $10 million seed round led by Dragonfly Capital in September 2020; a $30 million round in November 2021 from investors including Three Arrows Capital and Fenbushi Capital; a $12 million Series A led by Binance Labs in January 2022; and a $9 million raise from Wintermute and affiliated market makers in January 2024. The breadth of institutional participation reflects WOO's positioning at the intersection of CeFi liquidity and DeFi access.

Audit Status

Specific audit reports were not surfaced through publicly available documentation at the time of writing. Users should consult WOO's official security disclosures or the learn.woo.org documentation for the current audit status of deployed smart contracts.

Recent Direction

As of mid-2026, WOO describes itself as "AI-powered infrastructure for trading, automation, and onchain execution across every market," with the Starchild agent platform positioned as a core product alongside the DeFi suite. The handoff of WOO X operations to FusionX Digital in late 2025 signals a deliberate shift in team focus toward decentralized and AI-driven products — including the continued buildout of WOOFi on Solana and other non-EVM chains. A memorandum of understanding with Kraken's European operations arm was signed in July 2026, indicating continued institutional-facing growth.