19 March 2021

KR1 PLC

(“KR1” or the “Company”)

Investment Update: Vega Protocol

KR1 plc (KR1:AQSE), a leading digital asset investment company, is pleased to announce that Vega Protocol (“VEGA”), a portfolio project of KR1, has completed a successful US$5 million funding round led by Arrington Capital and Cumberland DRW. The funding round included participation from previous backers, as well as new backers like Coinbase Ventures and ParaFi Capital.

KR1 is also pleased to announce the Company’s participation in the recent funding round,  investing a further US$150,000 in exchange for 194,999.17 VEGA tokens at a price of US$0.77 per token. This investment comes in addition to KR1’s seed round participation, announced in October 2019. Across both funding rounds, the Company now holds a total of 842,493.91 VEGA tokens.

Vega is a decentralised derivatives protocol that allows anyone to launch markets and eliminates centralised gatekeepers to provide high throughput, low-fee trading in a capital efficient way. In doing so, the protocol bridges the immense industry of derivatives in traditional finance with the still nascent and rapidly evolving world of decentralised finance. Vega is currently advancing towards its mainnet release, with future plans including self-custodied cross-chain collateral, a trustless bridge into the Ethereum ecosystem, as well as bridges into other major blockchains such as Bitcoin, Polkadot and Cosmos.

George McDonaugh, Managing Director and Co-Founder of KR1, commented:

“Vega is one of the most anticipated projects in our portfolio and we are very happy to be able to support the team again in this latest round, especially considering the incredible progress they have made. A core excitement of the blossoming decentralised finance ecosystem has always been about the potential to open up financial infrastructure for everyone in a fair way and Vega will prove to be a major step change towards this becoming a mainstream reality.”

The Directors of KR1 plc accept responsibility for this announcement.

--ENDS--

For further information please contact:

KR1 PLC
George McDonaugh
Keld van Schreven
Simon Nicol

+44 (0)16 2467 6716

simon@KR1.io
Peterhouse Capital Limited
Mark Anwyl
Allie Feuerlein
(AQSE Corporate Adviser)
+44 (0)20 7469 0930
Nominis Advisory Ltd
Angus Campbell               
(PR Adviser)
pr@KR1.io

About KR1 plc

KR1 is a leading digital asset investment company supporting early-stage decentralised and open source blockchain and DeFi projects. Founded in 2016 and publicly traded in London on the Apex segment of the AQSE Growth Market (KR1:AQSE), KR1 has built a notable reputation for generating significant returns by investing in many key projects that are designed to power the decentralised platforms and protocols that are emerging to form new internet infrastructures.

www.KR1.io

Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) Disclosure

This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of the Market Abuse Regulation EU 596/2014 as it forms part of retained EU law (as defined in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018).