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Blast DEX Thruster raises seed round at $70 million valuation

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 OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Manifold Ventures and Arche Fund (formerly Coin98 Ventures) participating, Thruster said Thursday.

Angel investors, including Santiago Santos, Frax founder Sam Kazemian, Pendle founder TN Lee, Stacked founder Alex Lin, Renzo founder Kratik Lodha and Axelar founder Georgios Vlachos, also joined the round.

Thruster began raising funds for the seed round in late January, just a week before Blast's mainnet launch on Feb. 29, and quickly closed the round last month, 0xFri, a pseudonymous contributor to Thruster told The Block.

The round was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) plus token warrants and brought Thruster's valuation to $70 million, 0xFri added.

What is Thruster?

Thruster was launched in March as a yield-first DEX on Blast. It has quickly grown to become the second-largest DeFi protocol on the Ethereum Layer 2, with $320 million in total value locked, according to DeFiLlama data. Thruster says it has gathered over 100,000 users who have collectively traded nearly $2 billion of volume within less than two months of its launch.

"We saw Blast as an exciting new ecosystem to build on based on its yield and incentive-first model," 0xFri said. "In DeFi, yield and incentives are what drive attention. With Blast creating a system through which greater and more sustainable yields can be achieved, more users and builders should flock to that chain over others."

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. The yield from these protocols is passed back to Blast users automatically. The default interest rate on Blast is 3.7% for ETH and 13% for stablecoins, according to Blast's website. Blast currently has a TVL of $1.4 billion, per DeFiLlama data.

'Deep liquidity'

Thruster says it is a "deep liquidity" hub for the majority of Blast-native assets, with more tokens to come as Blast protocols progressively roll out their tokens.

Thruster's closest competitor is Ambient, but Thruster differs on various fronts, including the diversity of assets, according to 0xFri, who said Thruster has 40+ $100,000 liquidity pools compared to less than five on Ambient.

Thruster's integration-first approach to increase yield for its liquidity providers and being Blast native also differentiates it from Ambient, which is deployed on other blockchains as well, 0xFri added.

They went on to say that Thruster's developers and growth team have contributed to several top 50 protocols before, without giving specific details given the team's pseudonymity.

There are currently around ten people working for Singapore-based Thruster, and 0xFri looks to "considerably" expand its engineering team to develop its roadmap.

Thruster's roadmap includes more partnerships and integrations and improving the user interface and experience to match it with centralized exchanges.

"This fundraise will help us continue to work with leading builders to integrate Thruster products and liquidity into other top protocols across DeFi, NFTFi and more," 0xFri said.

Disclaimer: Larry Cermak, CEO of The Block, is an angel investor in Blast.