What if the uniswap model is not the endgame? Kuru Labs, supported by the latest investment from Paradigm, tests that theory with a daring plan to completely replace AMMs with an order book on the chain. Success can re -define the trade infrastructure of Defi.
On July 7, Kuru Labs, the startup is building a decentralized exchange on Ethereum-compatible monad, announced A series A Finance Round of $ 11.6 million under the leadership of Paradigm.
The increase, which follows a $ 2 million seed round last year, will be the development of feeding what could be the first fully functional central limit books for the EVM. The round included participation of remarkable angel investors such as Viktor Bunin, Zagabond and former FTX product leader Tristan Yver, which indicates strong industrial confidence in Kuru’s approach.
Build for a post-am future
The $ 11.6 million capital injection led by paradigm will mainly accelerate the two biggest priorities of Kuru Labs: the expansion of his engineering team and the use of his hybrid order book model on the upcoming Minnet of Monad.
In contrast to traditional AMM-based DEXs, Kuru architecture combines a central limit order with a fallback automated market maker, creating a structure designed to offer tighter spreads, while the liquidity does not dry out, at least in theory. The platform was built as a vertically integrated liquidity hub, including a discovery terminal, token launch path and tools for both active and passive liquidity facilities.
According to the announcement, Kuru’s goal is to streamline the Defi trademark stack in a single interface, something that the Kuru team believes that Legacy Dexs have not done.
“We are grateful to all our investors for their confidence in us, and for the constant support of the lively Monad and Kuru communities,” the team said in the announcement. “We look forward to launching on MAINNET and building the decentralized liquidity hub for the Monad Ecosystem!”
The approach of Kuru is ambitious because it disputes a fundamental Defi assumption: that AMMs, despite their inefficiency, are the only feasible model for decentralized trade.
Orderbooks have long been the gold standard in traditional financing, which offer price precision and deeper liquidity, but they have had a hard time because of the latency and gas costs of Ethereum. Even the lightning-fast Dex’s from Solana such as Phoenix rely on off-chain components, making Kuru’s completely on-chain Clob a technical gamble with high bet.
Kuru’s entire thesis depends on the technical promises of Monad: 10,000 transactions per second and a second block finality. Existing EVM chains such as Ethereum and Arbitrum cannot support a functional order book, because gas costs and slowly block the market makers do not soften quotes regularly.
The parallel EVM version of Monad and optimized status database are aimed at eliminating those bottlenecks, making it the first chain where a unchain chain could possibly compete with centralized exchanges.
