The decentralized exchange (dex) platform Orca has announced the platform has raised $18 million in a Series A financing round with Polychain, Placeholder, and Three Arrows co-leading the funding. The dex platform is a Solana-based project that aims to be the “go-to swap” platform for Solana.
Solana’s Orca Gets an $18 Million Capital Raise
On Wednesday, the Solana-based decentralized finance (defi) service Orca revealed the team has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round. The investment, Orca says, will “jumpstart our path toward making Orca the go-to swap for the Solana ecosystem.”
Solana (SOL) has seen a massive increase in value gaining roughly 5,184% in 12 months. The Solana protocol has attracted the development of all kinds of defi projects. Defi projects like Serum, Solaris, Parrot, Solrise, Dexlab, Senswap, Spiderswap, Solend, Port, Sypool, Solanax, Hydraswap, and more.
At the time of writing, the Orca defi protocol has $300 million total-value locked (TVL) into the platform. Orca details that the $18 million in financing stems from Three Arrows, Polychain, and Placeholder as the co-leads. Participation also came from firms like Defiance, Zee Prime, Coinbase Ventures, Solana Capital, Jump Capital, Sino Global Capital, and Collab & Currency.
“Not only is Orca responsive and affordable, but it is finance made fun, with a cheery experience, community, and broader values-based mission,” Placeholder partner Chris Burniske said during the announcement. “It’s teams like Orca that will bring crypto to the mainstream and redefine how we think of finance in our everyday lives.”
Orca launched in February 2021, by the Yutaro Mori and Grace “Ori” Kwan and the project started with no outside funding. “Since then, we’ve expanded the core team to 8, spanning three continents, broad professional experience, and many hobbies,” the Orca team said.
Three Arrows Executive: ‘Orca’s AMM Is a Critical Addition to the Solana Ecosystem’
The automated market maker (AMM) also has a native token called ORCA which is used for trading fees and liquidity pools on Aquafarms. Kyle Davies, the co-founder of Three Arrows believes a Solana AMM like Orca is needed.
“Orca’s AMM is a critical addition to the Solana ecosystem,” Davies remarked. “We are excited by the strength of the team, performance, and their community-focused mission,” he added.
While Solana has seen significant gains in 2021 and is now the seventh-largest crypto asset in terms of market cap, the network suffered an outage on September 14, 2021. Solana users were not pleased with the situation and following the aftermath, the Solana project team published an official blog post that discusses the outage in-depth with a detailed timeline of the events.