Apricot Finance, the Solana-based money market protocol that offers lending, borrowing, and other DeFi (decentralized finance) services, announced that it has closed a funding round worth USD four million.
The Solana ecosystem has seen substantial growth in the past couple of years. Apricot Finance aims to leverage this growth and has thus built a unique project that aims to become the DeFi solutions standard for this growing space. This up-and-coming project first managed to garner the attention of the marketplace after raising $800,000 in June. Soon after, the project further managed to cement its position as a promising Solana-based project by bagging first place in the East Asia category of Solana’s seasonal hackathon.
Now, in a recent development, Apricot Finance raised over four million USD in a funding round that saw the participation of some of the biggest names in the industry, including Delphi Ventures, Lemniscap, Solana Capital, Skyvision Capital, Advanced Blockchain AG, Ledger Prime, Struck Capital Crypto, Valhalla Capital, a41 Ventures, Komoreb DAO, GSR, MXC, Gate, CryptoJ, Coinsight Ventures, Global Coin Ventures, Darren Lau, Zhuoxun Yin, Jeff Kuan (Terra), Matt Cantieri (Anchor Protocol), Nick Tong (Perpetual Protocol) and others
With the success of this recent funding round, Apricot Finance aims to speed up the development and testing of the protocol, taking a big stride towards its long-term goal of becoming the go-to platform for personalized DeFi solutions.
The testnet of the project will launch in late August while the mainnet is expected to launch in September this year.
A Defining Protocol for the DeFi Ecosystem
The term DeFi was alien to the masses until a few years ago, but now, it is one of the most popular terms that promises a decentralized future to our world. With the rise of DEXs and decentralized protocols like AAVE, Maker, Curve, and Compound, the DeFi space has skyrocketed. The growth has been such that the total volume of assets locked in DeFi protocols grew from USD one billion in May 2020 to $88 billion at peak this year.
Despite such remarkable success, problems like lack of scalability, low throughput, and high transaction fees on popular networks like Ethereum haunt the users of these protocols. Solana, on the other hand, is a network that was built for scalability and mass adoption, achieving up to 50K TPS during its testnet.
Being built on a network like this, Apricot Finance is uniquely positioned to benefit from the high throughput, low gas fees, and scalability, ultimately providing users with an unmatched DeFi experience. The platform, with its innovative financial projects, aims to become the DeFi solutions standard for the marketplace.
The first of these projects is Apricot Lend — a collateralized lending platform that while being beneficial to lenders also empowers borrowers with max borrowing power. Next in line is a cross-margin leveraged yield farming platform Apricot X-Farm, which aims to let users maximize their capital efficiency in a convenient way. And finally, the platform will feature an automated self-deleveraging platform called Apricot Assist that will help users with down-side predictions.
While these are the initial set of products, Apricot Finance also has in its store innovative solutions for liquidation and bad debt processing coming in the near future
Closing Thoughts
The success of decentralized finance is evident to everyone who has closely followed this space. But, in the ocean of the larger financial ecosystem, DeFi is still just a drop. For DeFi to become the future of finance, we need a protocol that not just offers innovative financial solutions but does so in a secure, scalable, and affordable manner. Only then will mass adoption become a reality.
This is where Solana-based Apricot Finance could be the game-changer. With a suite of unmatched financial products, this project could soon become DeFi’s go-to protocol, propelling its growth in the right direction.
