Solana-Based Defi Margin Trading Protocol Raises $3 Million in Seed Funding

On Wednesday, the team behind Solana-based decentralized finance (defi) margin protocol Marginfi, announced Mrgn Labs has raised $3 million in seed funding from investors. With the recently acquired funds, Marginfi aims to build the first cross-margining engine on the Solana blockchain.

Mrgn Labs Gets $3 Million in Funding From Strategic Investors

Mrgn Labs has revealed the company has raised $3 million from investors in order to bolster defi margin trading, according to a press release announcement on Wednesday. Mrgn Labs is the team behind the defi margin protocol called Marginfi, a protocol that allows traders to access margin in a decentralized fashion. Mrgn Labs disclosed that the funding round was co-led by Multicoin Capital and Pantera Capital. Furthermore, Solana Ventures and Sino Global Capital participated in the fundraising as well.

“In 2021, we saw an explosion of innovative financial products emerge across defi,” Edgar Pavlovsky, the founder of Mrgn Labs explained during the announcement. “The problem is the trading experience is now extremely fragmented across different protocols, which destroys capital efficiency and prevents traders from combining their positions into one unified account. In 2022, we can finally break down these silos and make the entire ecosystem more composable,” Pavlovsky added.

A few defi based margin trading decentralized exchange platforms already exist like marginswap.finance, which allows people to swap tokens with up to 5x leverage. Metrics show the total value locked (TVL) in Marginswap today is $4,604,514 across BSC (Binance Smart Chain), Ethereum, Avalanche, and Polygon.

Mrgn Labs, on the other hand, wants to bolster institutional interest in defi-based margin trading. The press announcement notes that Marginfi is looking to bring “institutional-grade margining” to the defi ecosystem. The managing partner at Multicoin Capital Kyle Samani believes a new wave of next-generation protocols is coming.

“The most important theme of 2022 is composability. The next generation of defi projects will leverage critical composable primitives like Marginfi to deliver experiences that have never been possible before,” Samani explained in a press statement. “Marginfi is building the first defi-native prime broker, and it’s only possible because it’s being built on Solana,” the Multicoin Capital executive noted.

In addition to the institutional-grade margining goal, the company says it has plans to whitelist new institutions with the goal of $1 billion moving through Marginfi by the end of 2022. Mrgn Labs further explained that it plans to initiate a variety of trader-focused initiatives during the first quarter leading up to the project’s Devnet launch.