Drift is excited to announce a $23.5m Series A led by Polychain Capital with participation from the Solana founders (Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal), Ethereal Ventures (Consensys) and Folius Ventures, bringing Drift’s total funding to date to $27.3m.
This announcement was made at Breakpoint 2023. Drift is now the largest perpetuals exchange on Solana.
The fundraise will be directed towards expanding Drift’s product lines as well as building out further infrastructure that will bring more users and liquidity into the ecosystem, with the goal of being the largest perpetuals venue in all of crypto. Despite market challenges, Drift is consistently pushing all-time highs for volume, open interest, TVL and user metrics.
By harnessing what’s possible on-chain and combining that with a non-custodial and transparent experience, Drift’s vision is to scale beyond the CeFi market. As a next step, Drift intends to decentralise the protocol and push the frontiers of what’s only possible on Solana.
Key achievements
- Volumes: $400m+ average weekly volume, 8m in trades and $6b+ cumulative volume.
- Exchange Stats: 140m+ TVL and $60m+ open interest since the launch of v2.
- Liquidity: The protocol offers traders the deepest derivatives liquidity on Solana with over $20mn+ in orderbook depth.
- People: Started as 4 contributors and now over 20+ Driftooors across the globe.
- Products: Launched Superstakesol, built Connect and pioneered unique designs including just-in-time (JIT) liquidity and insurance fund staking on Solana.
- Community-Powered: Drift Liquidity Program (DLP) that allows anyone in the community to allocate to a market’s vAMM on Drift and has over $20mn in user provided liquidity across the platform.
- Ecosystem: Drift has established key partnerships with Circle as the premier DEX partner to bring CCTP to Solana, Metamask (Connect) to allow EVM users to trade on Solana and many others within the ecosystem.
What’s Next?
The funding round helps us pursue two main goals: growing our team with top talent and continually innovating our product design with:
- Decentralising core infrastructure as an engine for growth: For users to be sticky, they need to be owners of the protocol. With decentralisation as a fundamental goal, Drift has already opened up key functions of the protocol for users to participate in: DLP and the insurance fund. Over 95% of TVL on Drift is currently community owned.
- Launching Drift governance: Drift will be launching its governance program in 2024 which will introduce a governance token. Drift token-holders will be able to collectively discuss, propose, and vote on upgrades to the protocol. The terminal state of Drift is to have to it become a community governed protocol.
- Doubling down on mobile: 30%-40% of user trading sessions are on mobile. In 2024, Drift plans to launch a full Drift Mobile experience for distribution via Saga dApp store.
- Researching network infrastructure & QoS optimisations: Drift is investing heavily into network architecture research to reduce user confirmation times and rival centralised exchange experiences. Drift already boasts the fastest trading experience on chain with through our program architecture with minimal write lock contention to increase throughput.
What Drift investors are saying
“Drift continues to push the bounds on innovation as they introduce new liquidity mechanism to DeFi” said Olaf-Carlson Wee, founder at Polychain Capital. “They have shown remarkable traction over the past year to become the leader on Solana and we are excited to see them scale their vision beyond to overtake CeFi platforms.
Get In Touch!
🌐 Visit us at drift.trade 🌐
💬 Connect with us on Discord 💬
👾 Find us on Twitter — @DriftProtocol 👾
