Saber Labs, a Solana-based cross-chain exchange for swapping stablecoins and wrapped tokens, has raised $7.7 million in a recently completed seed funding round.
The funding round, which was described as an equity funding round by Saber Labs co-founder Dylan Macalinao, will help scale Saber’s team, support more assets on the platform, and improve marketing and product development.
Race Capital, with collaboration from Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital, Jump Capital, Multicoin Capital, and the Solana Foundation led the round.
More companies involved in the round including Angel investors, Tristan Yver from FTX, Jason Lau; Okcoin, Curve Finance’s Julien Bouteloup, Terraform Labs’ Jeff Kuan and Ryan Shea from Stacks.
The funds realized will be used to increase Saber Labs’ team from three people to about ten people by the end of the year.
Macalinao added that Saber hopes to expand its reach and support every major chain, especially Polygon and Celo, since it currently supports assets from the Ethereum, Terra, Solana, and Bitcoin blockchain.
Saber’s Impressive Growth
Saber launched last month on the Solana protocol as a cross-chain decentralized exchange and automated market maker (AMM) platform.
It allows users to swap between stablecoins and wrap tokens, in addition to providing liquidity and earning yield from transaction fees and liquidity incentives.
Speaking about Saber’s advantage over other competitors, Macalinao said the exchange’s competitive edge is the number of assets it supports and the fast-paced growth of its Total Value Locked (TVL).
He added that the funding was primarily related to Saber’s fast growth and the amount of its TVL.
The Solana-based exchange is currently the third-largest decentralized application on Solana in terms of TVL, with over $126 million in TVL, according to DefiLlama.
Solana is perceived to be a competitor to Ethereum as it is allegedly faster and cheaper for executing transactions.
Just a few weeks ago, the Australian energy trading tech firm, PowerLedger, revealed that it will be moving its in-house blockchain platform from Ethereum to Solana.
