The crypto trading app whose entire product is hiding the crypto - one USDC balance, any token, any chain.
The Slingshot mark. A logo for an app that wants you to forget it is an app - to hold one balance, tap buy, and never think about the machinery underneath.
Here is the thing about crypto, if you have ever tried to actually use it: the hard part was never the trade. The hard part was everything around the trade.
To buy a token in the pre-Slingshot world, you had to do roughly eight things in the correct order. Set up a wallet. Write down a seed phrase and vow to never lose it. Move dollars onto some exchange. Move the crypto off that exchange. Realize the token you wanted lived on a different blockchain than your money. Bridge your assets across chains, a process that has separated many earnest people from their savings. Buy a little of the network's native token to pay for "gas," because you cannot transact without it. Then, finally, pick a decentralized exchange and swap.
Slingshot's founder, Clinton Bembry, looked at that list and made a fairly radical product decision: what if the user did none of it? What if you held one balance - denominated in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin - and the app quietly handled the wallets, the bridging, the gas, and the routing behind the curtain? You would tap "buy." A token would appear. The eight steps would still happen, but they would happen to the software, not to you.
This is, in the parlance, "chain abstraction," and it is the sort of idea that sounds obvious the instant someone builds it and impossible the moment before. Bembry had the credentials to attempt it. He co-founded Astro Wallet, which Coinbase acquired, and then worked at Coinbase as a software engineer - which is to say he spent years watching normal people bounce off crypto's user experience. In 2020 he founded Slingshot in San Francisco to fix the part everyone else treated as immutable.
The pitch was almost aggressively boring: buy, sell, and swap tokens at the best available price, with 0% swap fees, from one balance. No bridges. No gas math. No wallet ceremony. Boring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage in a category that mostly ships dashboards for experts.
Slingshot's whole business is a subtraction problem. The winning product is not the one with the most features - it is the one that deletes the most steps.
There is a useful way to think about what Slingshot sells, which is that it sells the same thing your web browser sells. You do not think about TCP/IP or DNS resolution when you load a page; the abstraction is invisible, which is precisely why it is good. Slingshot wants trading a token to feel like that - the blockchain equivalent of "the internet just works." When it works, you notice nothing, and noticing nothing is the entire point.
The mechanism underneath is a DEX aggregator: rather than routing your trade through a single decentralized exchange, Slingshot pools liquidity from many of them and hunts for the best price. Layer the single USDC balance on top, add spot and limit orders, keep it non-custodial so users hold their own keys, and you have a self-custody trading app that behaves like a consumer product. That combination - the safety of self-custody with the ergonomics of a normal fintech app - is harder than it sounds, and it is most of what took five years to build.
Hold one dollar-pegged balance and buy any supported token with it. No juggling a separate stash of coins for every chain you touch.
Buy and sell across networks like Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon and BNB Chain. Slingshot handles bridging and gas so you never manually do either.
It is a non-custodial wallet - full control of your private keys and your crypto - wrapped in an interface that behaves like a normal trading app.
Search, send, receive and swap hundreds of thousands of tokens across seven blockchains - from blue chips to the memecoin your group chat won't stop mentioning.
Place market or limit orders on any supported token from that one consolidated, non-custodial balance - no gas budgeting required.
A MoonPay integration lets you turn fiat into crypto inside Slingshot, closing the loop from your bank card to the token you wanted.
Supported networks and token counts evolve over time; figures reflect publicly reported details and are approximate.
Slingshot lets users trade tokens from a single universal USDC balance, removing hurdles like wallet setup, bridging assets across chains, and juggling gas fees.
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed / Early | ~$3.1M | 2020-21 | Electric Capital, Framework, Coinbase Ventures |
| Series A | $15M | Dec 2021 | Ribbit Capital (lead) |
| Total | ~$18M | — | Across all rounds |
Some later reporting cited a higher cumulative figure (~$33M) around the 2025 acquisition; the $18.1M total reflects the widely reported figure at Series A close.
The December 2021 Series A had one of the more improbable cap tables in DeFi. Alongside fintech specialist Ribbit Capital sat K5 Global, Shrug Capital, checkout billionaire Guillaume Pousaz, Morning Brew's Austin Rief - and, memorably, The Chainsmokers and singer Jason Derulo.
The celebrity names made headlines. The actual signal was quieter: a serious fintech fund underwriting the bet that crypto's next users would refuse to tolerate wallets and bridges.
Clinton Bembry launches Slingshot in San Francisco as a DeFi trading portal and DEX aggregator.
Ribbit Capital leads a round joined by K5 Global, The Chainsmokers and Jason Derulo, bringing total funding to roughly $18M.
Founder Clinton Bembry is named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Finance.
Slingshot leans into chain-abstracted trading: a single USDC balance across multiple networks, 0% swap fees, self-custody.
The NFT marketplace buys Slingshot in a mix of equity and $ME token to expand from JPEGs into cross-chain on-chain trading.
In April 2025, Magic Eden - a marketplace best known for trading NFTs, which critics enjoy calling "tradeable JPEGs" - announced it had acquired Slingshot. On its face this is a strange purchase. NFT marketplace buys token-swapping app is not an obvious sentence.
It reads better if you assume the NFTs were never really the point. What Magic Eden wanted was a consumer on-chain trading experience that reached every chain, including Bitcoin - not just Solana, where it grew up. Slingshot, with nearly a million users and a product built entirely around hiding blockchain complexity, was that experience, already shipped.
Magic Eden CEO Jack Lu declined to disclose terms but said Slingshot received a mix of equity and Magic Eden's $ME token. The stated plan: more fiat-to-crypto on-ramps through the likes of Apple Pay and Venmo, plus AI-assisted tools for token discovery. Initially the two apps keep operating separately, with deeper integration to come.
The tidy version of the lesson: for five years Slingshot did the unglamorous work of deleting steps, and an acquirer decided that deleting steps - not minting collectibles - was the on-ramp to crypto's next users.
Slingshot is a crypto trading app that lets you buy, sell and swap hundreds of thousands of tokens across multiple blockchains from a single USDC balance, without manually bridging assets or managing gas fees.
Clinton Bembry founded Slingshot in 2020. He previously co-founded Astro Wallet (acquired by Coinbase), worked at Coinbase as a software engineer, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Finance.
Roughly $18M, headlined by a $15M Series A in December 2021 led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from K5 Global, Shrug Capital, The Chainsmokers, Jason Derulo and others.
Yes. Slingshot is non-custodial - you keep control of your private keys and your crypto while trading through the app.
Magic Eden, the NFT marketplace, acquired Slingshot in April 2025 in a mix of equity and $ME token to expand beyond NFTs into cross-chain on-chain trading.
Sources: Crunchbase, Forbes, CoinDesk, The Block, Fortune, The Defiant, CryptoSlate, Alchemy, MoonPay, and Slingshot's own channels. Figures are approximate and reflect publicly reported information as of mid-2026.