Econia Labs secures $6.5 million to build decentralized order books on Apto’s blockchain
Econia Labs, a startup developing decentralized order books for the Aptos blockchain, announced today that it raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Dragonfly.
Other investors who joined the round include Lightspeed Faction, Wintermute Ventures, Hudson River Trading, Flow Traders, Aptos Labs, among others.
Econia Labs develops an underlying toolkit of protocols that enable settlement and trading for decentralized finance applications and projects. Decentralized finance, also known as DeFi, is a financial technology that is based on secured distributed blockchain ledgers and uses cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange for financial transactions to provide financial services similar to banks and brokerages such as currency and stock exchanges, interest generation, lending and other services .
Econia’s protocol provides on-chain order books for the Aptos blockchain, which is fundamental to decentralized exchanges and marketplaces. Using Econia’s matching engine, orders can be settled during the transaction they are placed in, meaning they occur immediately. These order books open up the possibility of a variety of applications, including spot trading to leveraged futures.
“We recognize significant utility in a blockchain-based order book that provides integration of protocols to efficiently leverage on-chain capital,” said Alex, CEO of Econia Labs. (The CEO apparently only goes by a single name.) “Our goal is to support a comprehensive commerce ecosystem leveraging the Move programming language and Aptos’ Block-STM execution engine.”
The protocol and its tools were built in close collaboration with the Aptos Labs team.
Aptos Labs is a blockchain startup and the brainchild of former Meta Platforms Inc. employees who worked on the company’s ill-fated payment system Diem. The team repurposed the technology to develop a blockchain designed to compete with blockchain ecosystems such as Ethereum, which is the second largest blockchain by market capitalization.
Aptos developed Move, an open source smart contract programming language designed with enhanced security to speed up transaction times and cut costs, and Block-STM, which is a “parallel execution engine” the company claims is capable of executing over 160,000 transactions per second.
The blockchain launched its mainnet in October after raising over $350 million in funding through two rounds of venture capital, but the company has seen some criticism over its performance and the number of projects launched. As a result, the addition of the Econia Labs project will be a boon to the ecosystem by adding more opportunities for the developers of decentralized marketplaces.
As of now, Econia is complete with virtual machine-level features, and decentralized application builders can begin connecting smart contracts to the machine engine. Soon, DeFi developers will have access to client libraries, SDKs and indexers directly from the core protocol.
The company said the new funds will be used to expand the team and focus on community initiatives such as hackathons, grants for new projects and bringing developers into the Econia and Aptos ecosystems.
