Monad-based on-chain orderbook exchange Kuru raises $2 million in seed funding
Quick Take On-chain orderbook exchange Kuru has raised $2 million in a seed funding round led by Electric Capital. The funds will be used to grow the project’s team and prepare for audits ahead of a planned launch on the Monad testnet.
Monad-based on-chain orderbook exchange Kuru has emerged from stealth, announcing the close of a $2 million seed funding round led by Electric Capital.
Brevan Howard Digital, CMS Holdings, Pivot Global, Breed and Velocity Capital also participated in the round alongside notable angel investors, including Keone Hon, Jarry Xiao, and Eugene Chen.
Kuru claims to be the first fully on-chain order book DEX on Monad, providing users with a single platform to find, research and trade spot assets on-chain. The highly-anticipated Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 Monad is currently in the devnet phase, hitting 10,000 TPS during internal testing in March.
“While AMMs like Uniswap have been pivotal to the growth of DeFi, they come with limitations such as high slippage and underutilized liquidity,” Kuru co-founder Vaibhav Prakash said in a statement shared with The Block. “Thanks to Monad’s high throughput and quick block times, Kuru's orderbook can provide superior capital efficiency and much tighter liquidity."
Although current automated market maker exchanges allow the concentration of liquidity to improve capital efficiency, most protocols are converging toward an order book model, Prakash claimed.
“Our goal is to completely replace AMMs, by supporting both liquid and long-tail assets, all while keeping the process of providing liquidity simple,” Prakash said. “Active liquidity is vital for the orderbook. But expecting market makers to handle the flood of new coins every day isn't realistic. We are working on enabling users to passively provide liquidity onto the orderbooks.”
Prakash noted on-chain spot traders need different tools compared to derivative traders, but exchanges today treat them the same.
“We are trying to bridge this gap, making it easier for everyone to discover and trade their favorite assets,” the co-founder added. “Kuru has been designed for market makers allowing them to place/cancel limit orders at a low, constant gas cost. This leads to tighter spreads and more liquidity on our books.”
Kuru intends to use the fresh capital to grow its team and prepare for audits ahead of a launch on the Monad testnet.
"The Kuru team is addressing a challenging and crucial problem in DeFi. Fully on-chain order books will help DEXes close the execution gap with centralized exchanges, giving users the best of both worlds between slippage, self-custody and composability,” Keone Hon, CEO and co-founder of Monad developer Monad Labs said.
What is Monad?
Monad claims to have optimized the way Ethereum works to provide greater throughput — designed to offer up to 10,000 TPS with a one-second block time. However, this may be more challenging for node operators, with hardware requirements around twice as large compared to the main Ethereum blockchain.
Rather than simply cloning the Ethereum codebase, Monad says it’s building a new EVM from the ground up, using a pipelined architecture. This staggered approach, rather than carrying out each process one after the other, enables more efficient processing and instant block finality. Monad is also EVM bytecode compatible, making it simple for Ethereum developers to port their existing decentralized applications to the blockchain.
The mon token will be used to pay for transactions to be included within blocks, known as a carriage cost, and for transactions to be executed, according to Monad's technical documents released in September. However, Monad later removed the token name from the documents for unspecified reasons.
Monad Labs was co-founded by former Jump Trading developers. In April, it finalized a $225 million funding round led by investment firm Paradigm, with participation from Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, GSR Ventures and Greenoaks, among others.
Monad Labs previously raised $19 million in funding led by Dragonfly Capital following a $9 million pre-seed round in May 2022 and a $10 million seed round in December 2022.
Monad’s public testnet is expected to follow shortly, with a mainnet release anticipated later in the year.
Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.
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