Drift Labs Raises $3.8 Million in Seed Round
Drift Labs is excited to announce a $3.8M seed round led by Multicoin Capital. Alameda Research, Jump Capital, LedgerPrime, Not3Lau Capital (Darren & Daryl Lau), QCP Capital, Robot Ventures (Tarun Chitra and Robert Leshner) and ROK Capital also participated in the round.
Notable angel investors include:
- Jason Choi (Spartan Capital)
- Julian Koh (Ribbon Finance)
- Loi Luu (Kyber)
- Celia Wan (Dragonfly Capital)
- Dom Tsang (Solana)
- Hassan Bassiri (Arca)
- Windra Thio (Element)
- Zhuoxun Yin (Coinbase/dYdX)
- … and several others representing a blend of founders, investors and traders.
The funding announcement comes alongside Drift Protocol’s alpha mainnet launch. The capital raised in this round will go towards growing the team and providing liquidity on our Dynamic AMM (DAMM) and insurance fund.
Note from Kyle Samani of Multicoin Capital
“Despite the decentralized nature of crypto, centralized derivatives exchanges are still dominant. The DEX trading experience has lagged behind because slippage is high for large orders, and transferring funds between platforms is subject to massive gas fees. Low liquidity also leads to poor pricing,” said Kyle Samani, Managing Partner, Multicoin Capital.
“Drift addresses each of these issues directly, and their DAMM is a clever solution. Cross-margining is also one of the hardest features to implement in an exchange, but also one of the most requested features by traders. Drift has figured out how to do all of this, at scale, in a decentralized, non-custodial way.”
Beyond our investors, we want to recognise the incredible incredible support we’ve received from the community and greater Solana ecosystem. Aside from the grant we received from Solana, we were fortunate to spend time at Solana’s Chicago Hacker House, working alongside the some of the best teams in the space — all of which speaks volumes about how supportive the Solana community is and we are so excited to contribute to its growth.
Drift Protocol
Drift Protocol is the first perpetual swap exchange to leverage a DAMM. Drift’s DAMM is based on a virtual AMM (vAMM) but differs insofar as it features a new re-pegging mechanism that dynamically adjusts K to recalibrate liquidity in a trading pool based on participant demand and open interest. DAMMs, as a result, have the ability to be more flexible than traditional vAMMs and AMMs, which leads to orders of magnitude better capital efficiency and reduced slippage.
Drift’s mission is to make futures DEXs the best way to trade.
What’s Next?
Drift’s devnet was successful in attracting over 10,000 traders with over $2B traded to date.
Just yesterday, Drift launched its alpha mainnet with access restricted to only the most active and engaged users within its community. We wanted to reward our early believers and community supporters and reserving this opportunity for them to be first ones to access our platform is just one way we’re doing that.
Access to the mainnet has been incrementally gated in order to ensure a smooth technical roll-out by staggering the growth of deposits to scaling volume and open interest (OI) comfortably. Moreover, we wanted to reward our early community members with a chance to trade on our protocol before the world does.
Over the coming weeks, we will be launching numerous campaigns and giveaways to distribute these Drift Alpha Tickets in collaboration with Solana communities that have been critical to Drift’s success to date. You can read more on how to ape a ticket here.
We’re on a one-way path to being Solana’s top decentralised futures exchange and the Drift Alpha Ticket will let us know who our day ones are.
If this is a journey you’d want to be a part of, we love for you to be a part our community!
Get In Touch!
🌐 Visit us at drift.trade 🌐
📩 Email us at hello@drift.trade 📩
💬 Connect with us on Discord 💬
👾 Find us on Twitter — @DriftProtocol 👾
