Saber Labs, a core contributor to Saber, the first Solana-based cross-chain stablecoin exchange, has secured USD7.7 million in a seed round led by Race Capital, with participation from Chamath Palihapitya’s Social Capital, Jump Capital, Multicoin Capital, Solana Foundation, and others, as well as crypto industry leaders from FTX, Okcoin, Curve, Terra, and Stacks.
With the newest injection of funds, Saber will continue to expand its decentralised liquidity network, which already includes assets originated from Solana, bitcoin, Ethereum and Terra.
Saber helps users trade digital assets quickly and efficiently, using the Solana blockchain. The exchange is focused on supporting robust stablecoin markets. Since decentralised assets from one blockchain can’t natively exist on another, stablecoins offer an easy way to trade into and out of tokens on different blockchains and exchange value across the ecosystem. Saber’s innovation is an advanced algorithm that enables low-slippage trading while maintaining high capital efficiency for liquidity providers (LPs).
Saber also helps market makers earn yield in exchange for providing liquidity to the Saber platform. These users deposit tokens into Saber liquidity pools and earn passive yield generated from the transaction fees on the network and token-based incentives. In the near future, they will also be able to earn from automated DeFi strategies. As a decentralized protocol, Saber’s deep liquidity network can be seamlessly integrated into other DeFi apps.
“The number of decentralised finance (DeFi) users continues to grow at an impressive pace, increasing by 50 per cent in the first quarter of 2021 alone,” says Dylan Macalinao, Co-Founder and CEO of Saber Labs. “However, DeFi’s adoption is ultimately limited by the scalability of the most popular blockchains, which have become slower and more expensive during periods of heavy use. Compared to Ethereum’s approximate rate of 15 transactions per second (TPS), Solana can support up to 50,000 TPS, representing a 7,500x increase. As Solana’s core cross-chain liquidity network, Saber seeks to help facilitate and accelerate the transfer of assets between Solana and other blockchains.”
Saber has seen extensive growth since its beta launch last month, attracting over USD100 million in exchange liquidity. It has since become the fourth-largest application on Solana in terms of total value locked (TVL). By being the first Solana-based decentralised exchange to support key assets like Ren Bitcoin and Dai, Saber has quickly grown its global user base as the industry moves towards cross-blockchain interoperability.
“Saber is changing how cryptocurrency moves globally. Saber can do for cross-chain digital asset exchange what TransferWise did for international currency trading,” says Anatoly Yakovenko, President of the Solana Foundation. “Through providing the liquidity foundation for stablecoins on Solana, Saber can unlock the ability for quick, seamless transactions across blockchains.”
“I believe in the Macalinao brothers. Saber will become one of the core infrastructure layers for DeFi, as well as the number one DeFi app in terms of total value locked (TVL) within the Solana ecosystem,” said Chris McCann, General Partner at Race Capital and early Solana investor. “Dylan and Ian will no doubt make a huge impact in the DeFi universe.”
Saber Labs was founded by brothers Dylan and Ian Macalinao, who previously were founding team members at Pipe; less than a year after launch, Pipe’s trading platform for recurring revenues reached a valuation of USD2 billion. In June 2021, the Macalinao brothers became the first-ever Founders-in-Residence at Solana Labs, which recently announced a USD314 million fundraise led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain.
