Thruster Finance, a decentralized exchange protocol built on the Ethereum layer 2 network Blast, has raised $7.5 million in a seed funding round.
Pantera Capital led the round, with participation from OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Manifold Ventures, and Arche Fund (formerly Coin98 Ventures), Thruster announced Thursday.
Angel investors also participated in the round, including Santiago Santos, Frax founder Sam Kazemian, Pendle founder TN Lee, Stacked founder Alex Lin, Renzo founder Kratik Lodha, and Axelar founder Georgios Vlachos.
Thruster began raising a seed round in late February, just one week before Blast's mainnet launch on February 29th, and quickly closed the round at 0xFri last month, according to an anonymous contributor to Thruster. told The Block.
The round was structured as a simple contract of future shares (SAFE) and token warrants, valuing Thruster at $70 million, 0xFri added.
What is a thruster?
Thruster was launched in March as Blast’s yield-first DEX. According to DeFiLlama data, it has quickly grown to become the second largest DeFi protocol on Ethereum Layer 2, with a total of $320 million locked. Thruster says that within two months of its launch, it has amassed more than 100,000 users and in total has achieved a trading volume of nearly $2 billion.
“We saw Blast as an exciting new ecosystem that we could build on its yield and incentive-first model,” 0xFri said. “In DeFi, yield and incentives are what gets attention. By building a system that allows Blast to achieve larger, more sustainable yields, more users and builders will be drawn to that chain over other chains. We should get together.”
Blast is described as the first Ethereum Layer 2 network with native yield. Its yield comes from Ether staking and real-world asset tokenization protocols. Revenues from these protocols are automatically returned to Blast users. According to Blast’s website, Blast’s default interest rate is 3.7% for ETH and 13% for stablecoins. According to DeFiLlama data, Blast’s TVL is currently $1.4 billion.
“Deep liquidity”
Thruster says this is a “deep liquidity” hub for the majority of Blast native assets, with more tokens to come as the Blast protocol gradually rolls out more tokens.
Thruster's closest competitor is Ambient, but according to 0xFri, Thruster differs in a number of ways, including the diversity of assets, with Thruster having more than 40 assets worth $100,000 or more, compared to less than five for Ambient. said it has a liquidity pool of
Thruster is an integration-first approach to increasing yields for liquidity providers, and being native to Blast also differentiates it from ambient deployments on other blockchains as well, 0xFri said. added.
They went on to say that Thruster's developers and growing team have contributed to several top 50 protocols to date, but declined to provide specific details given the team's anonymity.
Singapore-based Thruster currently employs around 10 people, and 0xFri plans to “significantly” expand its engineering team to develop its roadmap.
Thruster's roadmap includes more partnerships and integrations, as well as improving the user interface and experience to be consistent with centralized exchanges.
“This funding will help us work with leading builders to integrate Thruster products and liquidity into other top protocols such as DeFi, NFTFi, and more,” 0xFri said.
Disclaimer: Larry Cermak, CEO of The Block, is an angel investor in Blast.
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