Econia Labs, a startup developing an order book protocol for the Aptos blockchain, raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round led by Dragonfly.

The company will use the funds to expand its team, support community initiatives such as hackathons and grant programs and help onboard developers to both the Aptos and Econia ecosystems, CEO Alex told CoinDesk in an email. Alex didn't provide a family name.

Portland, Oregon-based Econia Labs is building a back-end protocol to serve as a base layer for decentralized finance (DeFi) projects on Aptos. The protocol offers order books, a component of traditional finance and centralized crypto exchanges that allows traders to buy or sell assets at their desired price or to just take the best price offered by the market, Alex said. Econia brings order books on-chain in a transparent, permissionless way and supports integrations with DeFi applications that offer a range of trading options such as spot trading or leveraged derivatives.

“The Econia protocol provides a settlement engine at the base layer of Aptos DeFi, which enables other dapps to tap into a common trading venue,” said Alex, referring to decentralized applications. “With liquidity pooled into Econia’s order books, developers can focus on building out innovative products like perpetual futures, options, and margin trading markets on top of the core protocol without having to worry about matching and filling trades between counterparties.”

Other backers in the round included Lightspeed Faction, Wintermute Ventures, Hudson River Trading, and Flow Traders, among others. Aptos Labs also participated. Econia Labs developed the protocol in collaboration with the Aptos team.

Aptos Labs launched its blockchain mainnet in October after raising $350 million across two venture capital-backed rounds, though the ecosystem was rather sparse at the time as a number of teams had yet to launch their projects on the chain. Aptos Labs was created by several former Meta (Facebook) employees who were involved with the tech giant’s failed diem stablecoin, a similar founding story to Mysten Labs’ Sui blockchain.

The native token of Aptos Labs, APT, was up nearly 6% over 24 hours to $11.64 at the time of publication. It hit an all-time high of $16.46 in late January.

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