Paradigm leads $20 million Series A round for DEX developer Ellipsis Labs

Crypto exchange developer Ellipsis Labs raised $20 million in Series A funding led by the venture firm Paradigm.  

Electric Capital also participated in the round, which had additional support from Justin Drake and Mike Neuder of the Ethereum Foundation, Sreeram Kannan from EigenLayer, Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana Labs, Uri Klarman from bloXroute and others. Ellipsis Labs will use the funds to continue developing its DeFi tech stack. 

Ellipsis Labs develops Phoenix, a Solana on-chain order book decentralized exchange. "Ellipsis Labs set out 1.5 years ago to build better on-chain liquidity primitives," the firm said on the social media platform X, adding that Phoenix pairs "the efficiency of order books with the accessibility and transparency of DeFi."

The firm previously raised $3.3 million in seed funding led by Electric Capital in August 2023. 

Phoenix DEX

Phoenix has $14.31 million in total value locked (TVL) and saw $238.79 million in volume in the past 24 hours. It's the eighth largest Solana DEX in terms of TVL, according to the web3 data tracker DeFiLlama. 

Phoenix instantly settles trades by eschewing "crank." For blockchain ecosystems, especially Solana, a crank allows for asynchronous trade settlements so that numerous transactions can occur at once — forgoing the need for a transaction to be finalized for the next one to take place. Cranks provide high throughput and low latency, or the time between a transaction starting and finishing. However, cranks add complexity and less predictability to the system. 

Phoenix also provides all of its market events data, such as limit orders placed, fills and limit orders canceled, on-chain so that users can view the full history of Phoenix's activity. 

"The next step for DeFi must bring the advantages of a decentralized system — accessibility, transparency and auditability — to the liquidity and efficiency that only exists in traditional finance today," Ellipsis Labs said in a Thursday statement. "Phoenix is only the first step on the long-term path to a better financial system."