PANews reported on April 18 that according to The Block, Thruster, a decentralized trading protocol based on Blast, has completed a $7.5 million seed round of financing, led by Pantera Capital, with participation from OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Manifold Ventures and Arche Fund (formerly Coin98 Ventures), and angel investors including Santiago Santos, Frax founder Sam Kazemian, Pendle founder TN Lee, Stacked founder Alex Lin, Renzo founder Kratik Lodha and Axelar founder Georgios Vlachos. The financing structure of this round is a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) and token warrants, bringing Thruster's valuation to $70 million.
According to reports, Thruster was launched on Blast in March as a yield-first DEX. According to DeFiLlama data, it has quickly grown into the second largest DeFi protocol on Ethereum Layer 2, with a total locked value of approximately US$320 million. Thruster said it has gathered more than 100,000 users, and in less than two months after its launch, these users' transactions totaled nearly US$2 billion.
