Solana-based cross-chain exchange Saber raises $7.7M to expand team and tokens

Saber has raised $7.7 million in a seeding fund round and is rated as the second platform on Solana in terms of total locked value with $185.77 million.

Solana-based cross-chain exchange Saber raised $7.7 million in a seed funding round.

The platform launched last month and enables the cross-chain exchange of stablecoins and wrapped assets. Saber Labs, the development team behind Saber, announced the funding round on Wednesday.

The development team is currently a three-person unit and the firm will use the funds to hire around seven more staff members this year. It will also expand support to more assets on the exchange.

The next step for Saber is to integrate with more assets and protocols across the crypto universe — if you're building an app on Solana or elsewhere, we'd love to chat!

— Dylan Macalinao (@DylanMacalinao) July 27, 2021

The round was led by venture capital firm Race Capital, with participation from billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya's Social Capital, Jump Capital, Multicoin Capital and the Solana Foundation.

The seed round was also backed by angel investors such as FTX's Tristan Yver, OKcoin's Jason Lau, Stacks' Ryan Shea, Curve Finance's Julien Bouteloup and Terraform Labs' Jeff Kuan.

Saber co-founder and CEO Dylan Macalinao noted on Twitter:

“For DeFi to reach millions of users and trillions in value, we need a blockchain that can handle mass scale. Due to its low transaction costs and high performance, we believe Solana is that blockchain.”

The firm’s website claims that the platform offers “low slippage trading, even at large volumes.” Saber also offers liquidity-based passive yield returns from transaction fees.

According to data from decentralized finance (DeFi) platform DeFiLlama, Saber has the second-highest total value locked (TVL) on Solana with $185.77 million. Automated market maker (AMM) Raydium is currently sitting at the top with $572.21 million in TVL at the time of writing.

Solana is aiming to be a much more scalable competitor to the Ethereum network and it has been gaining attention in 2021, with dozens of DeFi projects launching on the platform since March.

Related: Metaplex NFT marketplace launches on Solana

Cointelegraph reported on June 9 that Solana Labs, the team behind Solana, raised $314.14 million through a private token sale, which was led by top crypto venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.

At the time of the $314.14 million token sale, Anatoly Yakovenko, founder and CEO of Solana Labs said the aim was to onboard one billion users on the network:

“The next phase is onboarding a billion users. Solana was built from the ground up to accommodate this scale.”