Zeta Markets secures $5 million for Solana DeFi expansion

Decentralized exchange (DEX) for perpetual trading Zeta Markets has completed a strategic $5 million funding round, led by Electric Capital and with contributions from DACM, Selini Capital, Airtree Ventures, and several notable angel investors, including Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana.

The fresh capital will facilitate the development of Solana’s first layer-2 solution by Zeta Markets, focused on decentralized finance (DeFi). The layer-2 rollup will integrate central limit orderbooks and enable seamless bridging from Solana, leveraging the expanding DeFi liquidity pool.

Therefore, the goal is to match the efficiency of centralized exchanges while preserving the security and self-custodial features inherent to decentralized platforms.

“We are incredibly grateful for the support of Electric Capital and our new investors who doubled down on our vision despite the uncertainty of the bear market,” stated Tristan Frizza, founder of Zeta Markets. “At Zeta Markets, our aim is to craft the ultimate one-stop trading platform, where users can benefit from the transparency of DeFi without having to sacrifice convenience and speed. This fundraise helps accelerate our current momentum and deliver an order of magnitude improvement via a ground-up redesign of our DEX.”

This investment increases Zeta Markets’ total funding to $13.5 million. Moreover, Zeta Markets recently crossed $6 billion in aggregated trading volume and over 100,000 monthly active users.

“We are thrilled to see the Zeta Markets team deepen their commitment to Solana with the unveiling of their ambitious L2 roadmap. We have seen firsthand their perseverance through the bear market and their commitment to the Solana ecosystem,” said Avichal Garg, co-founder and general partner of Electric Capital. “The Zeta team’s focus on building high-quality, decentralized solutions that solve real problems for users has resulted in tremendous momentum this year. After launching, they have been 50% of the perp volume on Solana for many days. We are proud to continue to support them as they broaden their vision beyond their successful DEX.”