Paradigm leads $20M funding round for Ellipsis Labs’ DeFi expansion

Ellipsis Labs, a developer in the crypto exchange sector, has secured $20 million in Series A funding, with Paradigm leading the investment round.

According to a post on X, Electric Capital also participated in the round, which had additional support from Justin Drake and Mike Neuder of the Ethereum Foundation, Sreeram Kannan from EigenLayer, Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana Labs, Uri Klarman from bloXroute and others

Ellipsis Labs is the developer behind Phoenix, a decentralized exchange (DEX) with an on-chain order book built on the Solana blockchain.

The funding obtained by Ellipsis Labs will be utilized to further advance its decentralized finance (DeFi) technology stack.

In August 2023, the company secured $3.3 million seed funding, with Electric Capital leading the investment round.

Phoenix, the platform developed by Ellipsis Labs, currently boasts a total value locked (TVL) of $14.31 million and recorded a trading volume of $238.79 million in the last 24 hours. DefiLlama, a Web3 data tracker, ranks Phoenix as the eighth-largest DEX on Solana based on TVL.

Phoenix achieves trade settlements by eliminating the need for a “crank.” In blockchain ecosystems like Solana, a crank facilitates asynchronous trade settlements, enabling multiple transactions simultaneously without waiting for each to finalize before the next.

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Phoenix also provides comprehensive on-chain market event data, including placed limit orders, fills, and canceled limit orders, allowing users to access Phoenix’s complete activity history.

Ellipsis Labs emphasized the necessity for DeFi to combine decentralized benefits with traditional finance’s liquidity and efficiency.

Crypto venture capital firm Paradigm — the leading investor — is reportedly negotiating a raise of up to $850 million for a new fund. Paradigm is discussing raising between $750 million and $850 million with investors as crypto markets have recovered in the past months. 

If Paradigm completes the raise, it would be its largest since it announced $2.5 billion for a fund in November 2021 at the peak of the last cycle’s bull run — the largest cryptocurrency fund ever at the time.

Paradigm also led a new funding round that is aimed at elevating the valuation of Merkle Manufactory, the firm behind the social network Farcaster, to the $1 billion mark, leading the round. Paradigm’s portfolio includes major crypto firms, such as Coinbase, Blur, dYdX, Compound, and Citadel Securities.

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