- Leading a seed fundraising round, Pantera Capital has secured $7.5 million for Thruster, a blast-based decentralized exchange platform.
- Thruster contributor 0xFri said that the seed fundraising was a SAFE plus token warrants deal, increasing Thruster’s valuation to $70 million.
In a seed fundraising round, Thruster Finance, a decentralized trading mechanism developed on the Ethereum Layer 2 network Blast, raised $7.5 million.
According to Thruster on Thursday, OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Manifold Ventures, and Arche Fund (previously Coin98 Ventures) were among the investors in the round, which was led by Pantera Capital.
The round was also joined by angel investors Santiago Santos, Sam Kazemian, the founder of Frax, TN Lee, the founder of Pendle, Alex Lin, the founder of Stacked, Kratik Lodha, the founder of Renzo, and Georgios Vlachos, the founder of Axelar.
A week before Blast’s mainnet launch on February 29, Thruster started soliciting money for the seed round in late February. The round was swiftly closed last month, according to 0xFri, a Thruster contributor who went by alias. The Block was informed of this by Thruster.
Thruster’s valuation increased to $70 million after the round, which was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) and token warrants, according to 0xFri.
What is Thruster?
Thruster debuted as a yield-first DEX on Blast in March. According to DeFiLlama data, it has rapidly expanded to become the second-largest DeFi protocol on the Ethereum Layer 2, with a total value locked of $320 million. In the two months since its introduction, Thruster claims to have attracted over 100,000 users who have exchanged about $2 billion in volume between them.
Because of its yield and incentive-first approach, we considered Blast to be an intriguing new ecosystem to expand upon, according to 0xFri. Attention in DeFi is driven by yield and incentives. Since Blast has developed a system that allows for higher and more sustainable yields, more users and builders ought to gravitate toward that chain rather than others.
The first natively yielding Ethereum Layer 2 network is called Blast. Ether staking and real-world asset tokenization methods are the sources of its yield. The yield obtained from these methods is immediately returned to Blast users. The Blast website states that the default interest rate for ETH is 3.7% and for stablecoins it is 13%. Blast’s TVL is currently $1.4 billion, according to data from DeFiLlama.
“Deep liquidity”
For the bulk of Blast-native assets, Thruster claims to be a “deep liquidity” hub; other tokens will be added when Blast protocols gradually release their tokens.
Ambient is Thruster’s closest rival, yet Thruster is different in a number of ways, including the variety of assets. According to 0xFri, Thruster offers more than forty $100,000 liquidity pools, whereas Ambient has less than five.
Thruster is different from Ambient, which is also deployed on other blockchains, in that it prioritizes integration over separation, which increases yield for its liquidity providers, according to 0xFri.
They continued by stating that, due to the company’s pseudonymity, Thruster’s developers and growth team had previously contributed to multiple top 50 protocols, without providing any particulars.
Thruster, a Singaporean startup, employs about ten people at the moment, and in order to build its roadmap, 0xFri plans to “considerably” grow its engineering workforce.
In order to keep up with centralized exchanges, Thruster plans to expand its partnerships and integrations while also enhancing its user interface and overall experience.
“This fundraise will help us continue to work with leading builders to integrate Thruster products and liquidity into other top protocols across DeFi, NFTFi and more,” 0xFri stated.
Disclaimer : This article was created for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. An asset’s past performance does not predict its future returns. Before making an investment, please conduct your own research, as digital assets like cryptocurrencies are highly risky and volatile financial instruments.
