Solana DEX Orca Raises $18M From Top VCs
Orca closes Series A investment round with allocations from Polychain, Placeholder, Three Arrows Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.
Key Takeaways
- Orca, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Solana blockchain has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round.
- The funding was led by Polychain, Placeholder, and Three Arrows Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, and others.
- The funds will be allocated to further enhance Orca as capital-efficient and user-friendly DEX.
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Orca, a Solana-based DEX has closed an $18 million Series A funding round from some of the crypto industry’s leading venture capitalists.
Orca: A Human Centered DEX
Despite the Solana network’s recent technical issues, its native DeFi projects have continued to attract venture capitalist (VC) allocations.
Orca, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Solana blockchain has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round, led by Polychain, Placeholder, and Three Arrows Capital.
Other investors that participated in the funding included notable VCs such as Coinbase Ventures, Jump Capital, Sino Global Capital, Solana Capital, Collab+Currency, DeFiance Capital, Zee Prime, and other angel investors.
Orca, described as a “human-centered” automated market maker, was initially launched in February 2021 and quickly became one of Solana’s top DeFi projects. Since then, it has attracted a TVL of $230 million and experienced more than $750 million in lifetime trade volume. Orca’s closest competitor on Solana is Raydium, a Uniswap clone and automated market maker that hosts more than 1.3 billion in TVL.
Leveraging Solana’s sub-second block times, Orca allows for fast permissionless trading of tokens. Additionally, users can provide liquidity to pools to earn trading fees. Orca differentiates from existing AMMs by focusing on delivering a simple user experience, so is easy for anyone to swap tokens and provide liquidity.
Commenting on the latest investment into Orca, Kyle Davies, Co-founder of Three Arrows Capital, said:
“Orca’s AMM is a critical addition to the Solana ecosystem. We are excited by the strength of the team, performance, and their community-focused mission.”
In addition to the DEX, the team has also distributed 14,000 marine-themed collectibles. This makes Orca one of the first projects in the Solana ecosystem to explore the intersection of NFTs and DeFi. In the future, the NFTs issued by the DEX will give holders access to special perks such as access to upcoming NFT projects and the opportunity to stake them to earn native ORCA tokens.
According to the team, the freshly raised funds will be allocated to further enhance Orca as capital-efficient and user-friendly DEX. In addition, the team plans to continue improving its open-source TypeScript software development kit (SDK) to make it easy for any project to build on top of Orca’s smart contracts.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, this author did not own any token mentioned in the article.
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