Ethereum Watch

Exotic Markets, a decentralized finance protocol built on Solana, has announced a $5 million raise to bring new structured products to the Solana DeFi ecosystem. 

Exotic Markets Raises $5 Million for Solana DeFi

Exotic Markets announced today that it completed a $5 million raise from various prominent investors and venture capital funds in order to fund new structured products it plans to bring to Solana’s DeFi ecosystem. Funding was done via a private token sale. 

The lead investors behind the raise were Multicoin, which has invested in projects like Eden, Arweave, Audius, and Solana itself, as well as Ascensive Assets, which has investments in Yield Guild Games DAO and Jenny Metaverse DAO. Other investors included Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research, Animoca Brands, Morningstar Ventures, and Solana Capital TPS. 

Exotic Markets is a decentralized finance platform for Solana that hopes to “bring wealth management and structured products out of the bank and in the [sic] decentralized finance world.” Structured products (market-linked investments) are pre-packaged investment strategies that are based on various financial products including securities, options (derivatives), indices, commodities, debt issuance, and foreign currencies. 

Structured products help investors take on highly-specific risks and yield parameters for a wide array of investment theses (e.g. the market will remain flat for the next three months). Exotic Markets seeks to make it simple to understand both the upside and downside of a given structured product. The team says it was built on Solana because of its fast and inexpensive transactions. 

Speaking on the token sale, Managing Partner at Ascensive Assets Oliver Blakey emphasized the utility and importance of structured products for the world of decentralized finance, allowing “for investors to generate yield denominated in stablecoin rather than governance tokens.”

Exotic Markets is not the only platform building on Solana, and investors have noticed. Solana is currently the fourth largest blockchain by market capitalization; its token began 2021 under $2 and climbed all the way up to a peak of roughly $259 on Nov. 5. At the time of writing, Solana is trading at $168.

This meteoric rise is likely in part due to the amount of money flowing into the Solana ecosystem. In Nov. 2021, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six partnered with Solana Ventures on a $100 million initiative focused on decentralized social projects (Web3) such as decentralized social media. The next month, Solana Ventures announced a $150 million initiative to fund blockchain-based games. This followed another nine-figure funding initiative from the month before that was focused on Web3 gaming for Solana. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH, AUDIO, AR, YGG, and several other cryptocurrencies.