Startup Econia Labs concluded the seed funding round that realized $6.5M. The startup that targets providing order book protocol to the decentralized finance established upon the Aptos Ecosystem had Dragonfly leading the round.

Econia Labs to Broaden Developers Team and Expand Hackathons Initiatives

Econia Labs targets to broaden its developers’ team while reinforcing support towards the community programs, including grants and hackathons initiatives. The company plans to utilize the funds generated in onboarding developers within the Econia and Aptos Ecosystems.

The startup spokesperson indicated that the funds would equally benefit from expanding the grant programs. The Oregon-headquartered Econia Labs announced advanced plans to establish back-end protocols that would constitute the base layer for forthcoming decentralized finance (DeFi) projects established upon the Aptos ecosystem.

Econia Labs Establishing Protocol Offering Order Books

The spokesperson clarified that Econia Labs seeks to establish a protocol to provide order books. He added that the order books involved integrating centralized exchanges and conventional finance allowing traders to execute the acquisition and sale of cryptos.

Econia Labs would offer a unique order book design upon which users can transact per the desired price. Alternatively, it accommodates users to assume the best price stipulated by the market.

Econia uniquely presents order books through a transparent, supportive, and permissionless mechanism. It features a compatible design supporting integration of DeFi applications identified to provide diversified trading options, including leveraged derivatives and spot trading.

Econia Pooling Liquidity to Empower Developers’ Creativity

Econia Labs representative indicated the protocol offers a settlement engine established as the base for Aptos DeFi, allowing other dapps to realize a shared trading venue. Pooled liquidity into the protocol’s order books is set to empower developers to create innovative products. As such, it provides the opportunity to specialize in creating perpetual futures, margin-based trading, and options without concerns about matching and filling trades among counterparties.

The funding round attracted several critical operators in the crypto industry, including Wintermute Ventures, Flow Traders, and Lightspeed Faction. Notably, Hudson River Trading featured alongside Aptos Labs being a partner in the joint development of the protocol with the Econia Labs team.

Econia Labs executive lauded Aptos Labs’ journey in launching blockchain mainnet in October 2022. The company journey featured two venture capital-led funding rounds to raise $350 million. The participants believed in the ecosystem’s viability despite operating with a sparse developers team that never had projects created on the chain.

Econia Labs executive noted the input of its founders, who were former Meta staff previously engaged in the failed diem stablecoin. As such, Aptos’ journey replicates the Mysten Labs’ input to deliver the Sui blockchain.

Aptos Token (APT) Market Outlook

An outlook of Aptos Labs’ performance by its native token APT shows the meaningful market activity in the past 24 hours. APT daily trading volume is up by 3.7% to realize $135.77 million, indicating rising market activity among the users.

At press time, 06:42 UTC, APT is exchanging hands at $11.35 despite earlier testing $11.80, a 1.91% decline as per CoinGecko data. APT has yet to regain the late January rally when it hovered around $19. The current price is 271.6% more than its lowest price of $3.08, 42.54% below the all-time high of $19.92.

The decline of 14.1% in the seven-day run illustrated in the CoinGecko data shows APT underperformance relative to a 2% gain in the global crypto market. Also, it trails rival Smart Contracts platforms whose cryptos are bullish with 2.6% gains.

Considering its circulating supply estimates of 180 million tokens, Aptos’ total market capitalization is $2.042 billion. The APT tokens are popular among Binance users, where APT/USDT is emerging as the preferred trading pair commanding $39,374,753 trading volume in the last 24 hours. Also, APT is commanding DigiFixen and OKX as other popular centralized exchange options.