Econia Labs Raises $6.5 M Seed Round
Building the Settlement Layer for Aptos DeFi
Econia Labs, a crypto startup building decentralized order book infrastructure on the Aptos blockchain, has raised a $6.5 million seed round led by Dragonfly, with participation from Lightspeed Faction, Aptos Labs, Wintermute Ventures, Hudson River Trading, Flow Traders, and others.
The Econia protocol pools liquidity for optimal capital efficiency through its atomic on-chain matching engine, which settles orders during the transaction in which they are placed. This design enables a wide array of applications, ranging from spot trading to leveraged perpetual futures. Designed around key performance innovations of the Aptos blockchain, Econia was developed in close collaboration with the Aptos Labs core team.
Kadin Donohoe, who led the investment at Dragonfly commented, “Amidst continued turbulence for CEXs, the need for decentralized order books is clear. Econia Labs has leveraged Aptos’s architecture to support atomic matching on-chain, and we are proud to support their vision for transparent, open markets.”
Following a year of iterative development, the open-source Econia protocol is now in its fourth major version, which has undergone three independent audits and is live on the Aptos Testnet. Econia is feature-complete at the VM level, and dApp integrators can already start connecting their smart contracts to Econia’s revolutionary matching engine. Soon, DeFi developers will also have access to client libraries, SDKs, and indexers that Econia Labs is building out in order to streamline integrations with the core protocol.
“We are excited to be building a high-performance settlement engine out in the open, and are making it easier than ever to integrate rich dApps with our innovative price discovery machine,” noted Econia Labs Co-Founder and CEO Alex.
The Econia Labs team is poised to broaden the DeFi ecosystem through its asset-agnostic order book protocol, and has a keen interest in teams developing permissionless exchanges for everything from spot trading to leveraged perpetual futures and other derivatives.
“From attendance at Aptos builder events to mentor-based partnership with upcoming accelerator programs, Econia Labs is gearing up to support a comprehensive DeFi ecosystem. We are excited for the broader DeFi community to check out our docs, try out our testnet deployment, and get in touch so that we can build the Economic Engine of Tomorrow, together,” said Econia Labs Co-Founder and COO Kirsten.
Econia Labs is now building out tooling and infrastructure around the core Econia protocol, and is actively expanding its development team. The company is currently looking for skilled full-stack engineers with a DeFi background and experience in trading views, SDKs, and the API/smart contract layer, who can work closely with the existing core team of top-notch engineers to accelerate the development cycle.
Gearing up to support a vibrant developer community around the globe, Econia Lab is also looking to source an APAC-based Ecosystem Growth hire to focus on the region. Head of Business Development Michael commented, “Our go-to-market strategy is simple: onboard as many developers as possible around the globe to start hacking away on top of Econia. The APAC region has a wealth of builders, and we’re thrilled to allure top talent that can coordinate initiatives in the region.”
For more information on Econia Labs or to inquire about joining the team, please visit the Econia Labs website. To stay up-to-date on the latest happenings at Econia Labs, follow them on Twitter @EconiaLabs.
