Tonic announced the close of a $5 million capital raise to build an open-source orderbook DEX on the NEAR Protocol. With this raise, Tonic will continue to expand its team and deliver a scalable platform for trading and building DeFi applications.
The funding round is led by Electric Capital and Move. dao5, Framework Ventures, NetZero Capital, Daedalus, and Bixin Ventures have also participated in the round. Tonic has also brought onboard prominent market makers such as GSR, Wintermute, Flow Traders, Cumberland, and Jane Street.
"Tonic is building a core piece of DeFi infrastructure for the financial ecosystem on NEAR." -Curtis Spencer, Partner at Electric Capital
Founded in January 2022, Tonic is building a decentralized protocol for fast and seamless trading of any asset on NEAR and Aurora. The Tonic platform will enable developers building on NEAR's Layer 1 solution to seamlessly integrate trading functionality into their applications.
With their deep ecosystem ties and protocol know-how, Tonic's lead investors will help drive the strategic growth and expansion of the Tonic platform over the coming months, and in turn help boost the adoption of NEAR's DeFi ecosystem at large.
"Tonic is building a core piece of DeFi infrastructure for the financial ecosystem on NEAR. Tonic's order book foundation allows for all sorts of financial primitives like swaps, spot trading, options, perpetuals, and likely some we haven't seen before to be built on NEAR." - Curtis Spencer, Partner at Electric Capital
"From our earliest conversations with the founders we knew we wanted to support them and Tonic on their journey. Not only are they addressing a significant opportunity, Tonic is a very product focused team with a strong emphasis on developer experience, open source and community. The NEAR ecosystem is fortunate that we can attract such talent and we are extremely excited to be involved from day zero." - Rune Bentien, Partner at MOVE
"NEAR has been growing rapidly in the last few months due to the NEAR Foundation's primary focus on developer experience. The Tonic team's contributions to the ecosystem will set the stage for NEAR to become one of the top destinations for DeFi applications." - Tekin Salimi, Partner at dao5